One of the most successful captains in cricket history and the current coach of the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2021 team Delhi Capitals, Ricky Ponting has revealed his struggles dealing with the maverick and reckless Indian batting talent in Prithvi Shaw, who has witnessed incredible highs and lows in his short career so far. Ponting said he believes Shaw can be the next ‘superstar’ from India.
Despite being acknowledged and touted as one for the future as far as the Indian cricket is concerned, Shaw has not been able to make his place permanent in the Indian national side despite plenty of opportunities coming his way especially in Test cricket, after making his debut in the longest format in October 2018.
Shaw was recently a part of the Indian team in Australia but he was dropped after the first Test owing to lack of runs, and he retuned to the domestic circuit to lead Mumbai to a title win in the 50-over Vijay Hazare Trophy while making four centuries in eight matches and averaging more than 165 with the bat.
However, Ponting sounded a little skeptical about the progress that Shaw has made with the right-handed batsman set to be a key player for Delhi Capitals in IPL 2021 with Rishabh Pant as their new captain, owing to the unavailability of Shreyas Iyer.
Before he left for India, Ponting told Cricket Australia’s website,
”I’ve tried (taking Shaw under his wing) the last two years and I’ve really enjoyed working with him. I’ve had some really interesting chats with him through last year’s IPL, just trying to break him down, trying to find out exactly what was the right way to coach him and how I was going to get the best out of him.”
Ponting revealed that Shaw refused to train under one of the world’s best batsman across formats ever.
“But he had an interesting theory on his batting last year—when he’s not scoring runs, he won’t bat, and when he is scoring runs, he wants to keep batting all the time. He had four or five games where he made under 10 and I’m telling him, ‘We have to go to the nets and work out (what’s wrong)’, and he looked me in the eye and said, ‘No, I’m not batting today,”
Ponting said.
“I couldn’t really work that out. He might have changed. I know he’s done a lot of work over the last few months, that theory that he had might have changed, and hopefully it has, because if we can get the best out of him, he could be a superstar player,”
he added.