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Ricky Ponting batting at Edgbaston last week. Photo: Tom Shaw/Getty Images.
Three – yes, a whole three – cheers for Dominic Lawson’s article in the Independent today. He is right: booing Ricky Ponting is disgraceful. There may be a cartoonish element to it all and perhaps the Barmy Army will signal this by cheering the Australian skipper to the echo at the Oval when, we assume, he plays his final test innnings in England, but that’s still not quite good enough. For the time being, too many England cricket fans – not to be confused with supporters of English cricket – seem to have decided that Ponting is some kind of villain.
True, he’s been in trouble with the ICC in the past and true his comments in the immediate aftermath of the draw in Cardiff were ill-advised (even if they were also, let us be candid, entirely correct) but let us also remember that he took his side’s defeat at Lord’s with grace and, by Australian standards, some class.
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