Paucity of leadership led to ball-tampering misconduct, believes Ricky Ponting

Former Australian Captain Ricky Ponting feels that experienced players leaving the team at once lead to the leadership crisis which led to the ill-famed ball tampering scandal in South Africa in 2018. Steve Smith and David Warner were punished with one-year bans, while Cameron Bancroft was suspended for nine months by Cricket Australia for their roles in the ball-tampering scandal which happened in the Cape Town Test in March, 2018 and rocked the world of cricket.

“I was a bit worried that with a lot of the experience going out of our team at the same time, that there would be a bit of a void left with experienced players to be able to say ‘no’ basically,”  says Ponting reported Sportstar.

“If I look at where things got at Cape Town, I just don’t think there were enough people around in that team to say ‘no’ to some of those guys. Things got completely out of control. That’s very much an outsider’s view on it. I had nothing to do with the team really until the last couple of years around some T20 cricket and the World Cup last year,” he added.

The legendary right-hand batsman and the World Cup winning skipper also revealed that he delayed his retirement by a few years as he was worried about the direction the team would go without him. Ponting bid his final goodbye to cricket in December 2012 after playing the Perth Test against South Africa. 

“I probably should have retired three or four years earlier than I did but I was really worried about where the direction of the Australian cricket team was going if I wasn’t around,” Ponting said during a fund-raising dinner for the Chappell Foundation at the SCG.