Hard code to crack!

Delhi Capitals boss Ricky Ponting says guiding a franchise team is a lot more challenging than mentoring a national side; Australia’s 2003 and 2007 ODI World Cup-winning captain believes it’s a tough task to create a group culture with limited time at one’s disposal

Delhi Capitals head coach and former Australia captain Ricky Ponting has said that the challenges a coach faces while handling a franchise makes the job more difficult than coaching a national team. “I think it is a lot more difficult being a coach of a franchise team because the different nationalities involved, a few Australian coaches, couple of Australian players, couple of South African players, we have New Zealanders, we have Nepalese part of our squad over the journey,” he said.

‘Hard to make big skill changes’ 

Ponting led Australia when they topped the Test match charts apart from leading his country to ODI World Cup triumphs in 2003 and 2007. He was a member of Steve Waugh’s World Cup-winning squad in 1999. “The hardest part of coaching with the franchise is getting the players together for a few days before the first game of the season, when you are trying to create culture around the team, you haven’t got much time with the players. It’s really hard to do that, it is also hard to make big skill changes in such a short period of time,” he said, listing the difficulties of the job.

Talking about the evolution of the game in the last decade, Ponting said the space for batters with “classical technique” is shrinking. “Look at the way England are trying to play now. They haven’t got it exactly right yet... players have come through playing a lot of one-day or T20 cricket. 

There still is room for purist batsmen in Test match cricket, but that’s going to be less and less,” he said.

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Ponting said Indian superstar Virat Kohli and Englishman Joe Root are among the few top batters with a classical technique. “In the last 10 years there is not a lot of classical technique in the modern-day batters, you look at the absolute best now, Joe Root is probably the most classical one. Steven Smith what he has done over the years has been a little bit different, Marnus Labuschagne has been a bit different with the way he plays. Virat is classically, technically very good as well, but I think there is a bit of a shift,” he said.

Mumbai talk in Delhi

Speaking at the same event, Amre said his book underlines the importance of having a good mentor. “When I became the coach of the Mumbai Ranji Trophy team for the first time in 2006-07, in the semi-final, we were 0 for 5, the top-five had been dismissed for zero,” he recalled. “But the whole team believed that they could come out of that, and they did it. As a coach, I was very proud of that. They went on to win that game and also the championship, hence I chose that title for the book.”

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