Our young Indian talent at the top order are special: PBKS coach Ricky Ponting

Chennai: Lauding the Indian players in Punjab Kings’ roster as “special” talents, head coach Ricky Ponting says the franchise had the aim of rebuilding the team around the “highest-quality” domestic players.

The PBKS had retained just Prabhsimran Singh and Shashank Singh, and went into the auction with a heavy purse of Rs 110.5 crore, and made some high-end buys such as Shreyas Iyer, Yuzvendra Chahal and Arshdeep Singh.

They have been forming the team’s core since IPL 2025.

“Our young Indian talent, the guys at the top of the order, are pretty special. To build some of those Aussie guys around them, we had a really clear strategy going into the auction (2024) about trying to rebuild this whole team from the bottom up, and change and be different as a franchise,” Ponting told JioHotStar.

Young opener Priyansh Arya vindicated Ponting’s words with a blistering 11-ball 39 before skipper Shreyas Iyer made a composed fifty to marshal the chase of 210 against Chennai Super Kings at Chepauk on Friday night.

“By just keeping Prabhsimran and Shashank, it gave us an opportunity for me to pick the guys that I wanted to work with.

“Shreyas was obviously number one on the list. But it was really important to get the highest-quality Indian players into our team with Arshdeep and Yuzi,” he added.

Chahal bowled a crucial spell in the middle overs, taking a wicket for 21 runs in three overs.

Former India spinner Harbhajan Singh was impressed by Chahal’s outing against CSK.

“Chahal isn’t very tall, so he uses that to his advantage by giving the ball more air and flight. The more you flight the ball, the more revs you get. And the more revolutions there are, the more the ball will dip and turn because of this, the batter feels like the ball is coming towards them, but it actually isn’t; the ball is still far from them.” The veteran leg-spinner also grabbed two wickets against Gujarat Titans a few days back, giving away just 28 runs in his four overs.

“This is classical spin bowling, which is a dying art, almost like dinosaurs; there are only a few left now. There’s Kuldeep, there’s Chahal. The rest say they are spinners, but like everyone else, they don’t bowl like one, they just keep bowling fast,” he said.