Michael Clarke admits to being part of the panel that dropped Ponting – Cricket News Update
Australian skipper, Michael Clarke, has admitted that he is part of the 5-man selection panel headed by John Inverarity, which made the tough decision to drop veteran batsman Ricky Ponting from the national ODI squad earlier this week.
“I'm 100% part of the selection panel,” Clarke confirmed. “That's part now of the captain's job. We've made this decision as a panel. It is tough not having the great Ricky Ponting out there playing for us but that's the decision we've made.”
Ponting was axed from the squad following a string of poor performances in the ongoing Commonwealth Bank series, which saw the usually brilliant batsman scoring a mere 18 runs in five innings.
While he admitted that his exclusion from the squad had been unexpected, and taken him by surprise, the 37-year-old accepted the decision with good grace. However, he did not formally announce an official retirement from one-day cricket, saying, instead,
that he did not foresee a future for himself in the format anymore.
Several former players, including Allan Border and Matthew Hayden, have spoken out against the unceremonious manner in which Ponting had been dropped from the side. However, Clarke is convinced that the decision was necessary, and will not lead to any hard
feelings between him and the former captain.
The 30-year-old recalled an instance when he was dropped during Ponting’s captaincy (when the captain obviously played a part in deciding the playing XI for every match), and the skipper came up to him personally to inform him of the panel’s decision.
“He knows it's certainly not personal. I'm very confident our friendship is a lot stronger than that,” Clarke insisted.
The two players are expected to team up for the national side when the Aussies travel to the Caribbean Islands to play the West Indies in March this year. The tour begins with a 5-match ODI series, followed by two T20s and a Test series.
Ponting has expressed his desire to continue playing in the longer format of the game, and one expects him to feature in the middle-order when the Test leg of the tour commences on April 7, at the Kensington Oval, in Bridgetown, Barbados.