Ricky Ponting’s pre-match press conference on Thursday afternoon was almost exclusively devoted to Wednesday’s IPL auctions. The Australian skipper admitted to disappointment at not having gone for more than $436,000 (Australian), though he appeared to take it in his stride.
“I was a bit surprised and disappointed, I thought I might have gone for a little bit more than I did. The fact that I haven’t made a lot of runs over the last couple of weeks hasn’t helped. Who knows? Maybe my involvement in the Harbhajan thing, but then I thought hang on, Symmo was involved in that as well,” he said, referring to Andrew Symonds being bought by Hyderabad for $1.47 million. “But realistically, we as Australian players won’t be able to take part in it in the first couple of years anyway. Some of the other numbers are quite astronomical for cricketers. It just goes to show how serious a lot of these franchises are about the event for the first three years.”
Like Mahela Jayawardene will renew association with former Sri Lankan coach Tom Moody for Mohali, Ponting’s coach in Kolkata — whom Sourav Ganguly will lead — will be John Buchanan. “I already had some contact from John this morning. I am pretty excited about the whole thing. But right now, we have this series to focus on.”
Ponting and Matthew Hayden ($409,000) fetched the least amounts among current Aussie players, but the skipper ruled out any rancour in the dressing room. “I will have a bit of a laugh and a joke about it,” he said of the contrasting drawing powers of the Australian players. “There’s only me and Matty anyway who would have any reason to be jealous of anybody else, and Matty and I aren’t those sort of people.”
Regular spot
Reiterating the need for a regular spot in the ICC calendar for the IPL, Ponting observed, “I don’t think there has ever been that we have had too much cricket. It’s the way it has been scheduled and programmed that has been difficult to cope with a lot of the time. I have always said that the amount of cricket we are playing is about right as long as it is not too compacted and too compressed. For the betterment of the game worldwide and international cricket, the ICC and the home bodies have to see how they can fit IPL in. Because if they don’t, then you could see the loss of lots of very good Test and one-day players just giving it all up and going and playing the Twenty20 tournament.”
Giving the Twenty20 format the thumbs up, he went on, “There was some studies done in India a few weeks ago about the Twenty20 game, and something like 87 percent of all cricket fans had Twenty20 as their favourite version of the game. I think we all saw it coming, to tell you the truth. I had some apprehensions about the game going into the World Cup but once the World Cup went off and I saw how big it was and how well received it was, I totally expected that this game would grow into what it’s becoming now.”