If a cricketer has a lean run at 23, he’s impatient and inexperienced. If a cricketer has that same lean run at 33, he’s over-the-hill and his reflexes are failing. Come on!
At what stage do we look at our elite sportsman and start to realise that we may have taken their super-human performances for granted?
Enough has been said about Ricky Ponting’s captaincy, much of it unquestionably spot-on. But now the verbal jibes have been aimed at his batting.
Ponting has taken a written bashing over the last couple of years with calls that he’s ‘too old’ and ‘his reflexes are starting to fail’ as if he was struck down by a debilitating disease overnight or somehow aged 25 years between seasons.
Is it really his age that is posing problems to his batting?
I’m not going to pretend that Father Time doesn’t catch up with us all. As a cricketer about to turn 30, I also feel the cracks and snaps a little more these days.
However, I’d like to think that any problems I have with picking up the pill out of the bowlers hand or timing the cherry sweetly are not down to my age and have more to do with form, which everyone knows can fluctuate if you aren’t preparing well, keeping on top of your fitness, and taking measures to stay sharp.
Today’s cricketers couldn’t be better prepared and the level of fitness injected into the game’s elite is at its obvious peak – Ricky Ponting being one of the most meticulous at training and preparing.
Cricketers these days even have to meet fitness tests designed for classically athletic sports such as sprinting, long distance running and other physically demanding feats of the body.
Now, let’s face it, at 35 no one should be swapping a Kookaburra Kahuna for a walking stick or the Swisse Ultivite for a Viagra. This notion of an elite athlete in their mid 30s being over-the-hill has to be deemed redundant.
How about we as commentators, journalists and fans try to understand that it may be just a dull patch and nothing more. No different to if a player wasn’t timing the ball well at 23.
Let’s put this into perspective:
The statistics below illustrate a typical life cycle of a legendary batsman – an ‘ok’ start, building up to a high middle career, an even higher mid-late career, and then a slight taper off towards retirement.
To average 44.13 in test cricket from the age of 32 to present (35) is still fantastic and if you said to any young cricketer today, “In your first 3 years, you’ll score over 2,500 test runs at an average above 44 with six tons and one of them will be a double,” I’m sure they’d accept that with a smile from ear to ear.
So is Australia’s second best batsman of all time too old to keep up with today’s bowlers or just a brilliant batsman coming back to the rest of the ‘very good test batter’s field?’
In my book, any talk of age being a barrier is nothing more than a lazy attempt at assessment. Lay off the Punter bashing, because the only thing getting old around here is that.
Period Matches Runs HS BatAvg 100’s Overall 144 11928 257 55.22 39 1995-2003 64 4264 197 47.91 14 2003-2010 80 7664 257 60.34 25 Age 32-35 34 2560 209 44.13 6
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