Ashes 2021-22: Don't Think I've Seen A Worse-Performing Team In Australia: Ricky Ponting Slams England

Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting slammed the Joe Root-led England team for its performance in the Ashes, calling them a worse performing team in Australia.

Australia thumped England on the third day of the Boxing Day Test match as they sealed the win by an innings and 14 runs to win the Ashes with after leading 3-0.

England were bundled up for 68 inside the first session as debutant Scott Boland scripted remarkable figures of six wickets for seven runs.

Joe Root was England’s top-scorer with 28 and despite him staying firm on the crease, the wickets kept tumbling from the other end. Mitchell Starc (3/29) played a great hand to Boland in routing England for another misery total.

Australia never let England settle right from the start of the first Test in Brisbane where they won by nine wickets inside four days.

They followed their success with a 275-run victory in Adelaide despite some dogged resistance by Jos Buttler to delay the result.

Ricky Ponting Asks England to make suitable conditions like Australia back in the home

Ponting condemned the performance of the England cricket team and asked them to start preparing for tough conditions in England itself.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a worse-performing team in Australia than what I’ve seen over the last three games. We’ve been through this in Australia. You wind the clock back a few years ago when we had our struggles in England, we changed conditions, we changed the ball, we changed everything because we were poor in those conditions,” Ponting told cricket.com.au.

“England might need to have a look at how they can make their conditions more suitable to ours. They play well in England still but they don’t play well when they come here – so maybe they play more with the Kookaburra ball. Maybe they flatten the wickets out a little bit so there’s not as much swing and seam, so the batters are making bigger scores and batting for longer periods of time. It might be the exact same blip that (Australia) had to have three or four years ago,” he added.

Ricky Ponting calls for technical improvement from England openers

Root scored 1708 runs from 15 Test matches at an average of 61 with four fifty-plus scores and six hundreds. The second-highest run-scorer from England in this calendar year is Rory Burns with 530 runs, which tells how much the team relied upon Root to make runs.

England’s top-order has been under fire with runs; although Zak Crawley replaced Burns in the third Test there was no change in terms of output. Ponting pointed out that many England batters have flaws in their batting technique.

“Some of the English top-order batters that I’ve seen in the last couple of tours, without giving names, there’s some techniques there that I just know are not going to stand up at Test level. In challenging conditions and world-class bowlers up against substandard techniques, then you get what happened today (at the MCG),” Ponting mentioned.

“The little swing dibbly-dobblers that are getting them out over there (in county cricket), they’re not facing that at Test level. They’re facing guys who can actually bowl. What I’ve seen with their batting, they’re just simply not good enough,” he added.

England will play against Australia in the fourth Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), the match starts on January 5.

Also Read: That Could Conceivably Be The Last Test He Plays – Ricky Ponting On Scott Boland