Re: The Official Cricket Thread
having averaged 28 and 31 (with the ball) over 2 seasons of sydney 1st grade cricket i'm pretty sure i'm not shit, and my opinion has some empirical merit.
Results reflect the performance of the team yes. It is the captains responsibility however, to ensure the team performs at it's optimum, through strategic game-play to win games. Over my time of watching and playing professional cricket i've watched and played with some great and not so great captain's. A horrible captain is like an anchor on a team, however good the team may be, indiviudally. For Ricky to have such an impressive record, whilst partly attributing to the skill of the players, can also be put down to his leadership abilities. His arrogant and hostile demonour, is like his killer instinct, or win at all costs. At the end of the day, his job is to win games of cricket. They Australian's have always been known to stretch the moral boundaries. Having talked to greg matthews (he plays for syd uni 1st grade), he use to tell me about the ridiculous slander and banter the team would employ. Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Mark taylor - you name it, they all know how to give it to the opposition to throw them off their game. They surely weren't happy with a loss. I'm sure everyone has seen that video clip of Allan Border losing the plot when we lost that test match by 1 run, to that dubious decision. (against England, and they had a record 10th wicket partnership stand in an ashes series at the time)
It's a professional sport. You are never happy with a loss. It's failure. You can imagine for Ponting, coming from an era of winning, (and being the first captain to lose the Ashes in 18 years or whatever it was) it would be tough to take a loss graciously.