Ricky Ponting to have a hard conversation with Ravichandran Ashwin, forbidding him from Mankading
Former Australian captain Ricky Ponting, who is currently serving as head coach of the Delhi Capitals, said on The Grade Cricketer Podcast that he will be having a tough conversation with new recruit Ravichandran Ashwin over the idea of mankading batsmen. The Delhi Capitals head coach believes that the franchise has a strict policy against the controversial method of dismissal.
Ashwin, who was leading the Kings XI Punjab at the time, had kicked up a major controversy in the IPL last year after he dismissed Rajasthan Royals’ Jos Buttler after the Englishman had treaded out of his crease at the non-striker’s end. Ponting narrated that soon after the incident, he had a conversation with the Delhi Capitals players on the same.
Ponting said, “I’ll be having a chat with him about [mankad], that’s the first thing I’ll do. Obviously, he wasn’t in our squad last year, he’s one of our players that we tried to afford to bring in this year.
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“Look, he’s a terrific bowler, and he’s done a great job in the IPL for a long period of time now, but I must admit watching that last season, as soon as it happened and he did that, I actually sat our boys down and said ‘Look, I know he’s done it, there’ll be others around the tournament who’ll think about doing this well but that’s not going to be the way that we play our cricket. We won’t be doing that’.”
Ricky Ponting does not want an encore of the above
“So, that’s going to be a conversation and that’s going to be a hard conversation I will have to have with him, but I’m pretty sure he’ll take it on the chin. I think, even him, looking back now, probably he’d say it was within the rules and he’s right to do it, but this is not within the spirit of the game, not in the way I want, at least with the Delhi Capitals anyway.”
The reason why the conversation is deemed to be a tough one is due to Ashwin’s own stance on the issue. The former Kings XI Punjab skipper has vehemently defended his actions several times after the incident, his exact statement being, “What I did is what the rules are supposed to be.”
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Ponting went on to suggest his own preferred solution for stopping non-strikers gaining an unfair advantage. He said, “I think there’s ways that you can actually stop batsmen cheating like that. If the bowler was to stop, and the batsman was a foot out of his crease for instance, why don’t you just penalise him some runs or something? Then they won’t do it again.
“You’ve only got to do that once at the start of a tournament, and then all the players see it, and you can guarantee the players won’t be fudging any ground from then on. I chatted to some of the match referees about it during last year’s IPL as well. If the umpires make a stance and do something to warn the batsman that they might be cheating, then that’s better than having the ugly incident of a mankad.”