Ponting highlighted Labuschagne's inability to score off the back foot.
Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting has urged selectors to drop Marnus Labuschagne after the No. 3 batter fell for just 4 runs off 9 balls on the opening day of the second Test against Bangladesh in Mackay.
Labuschagne has failed to reach a century in 43 consecutive Test innings, with his last triple-figure score coming against England in July 2023. Over his last 10 innings, he has scored just 170 runs at an average of 17.0, failing to hit a single half-century. His Test average since his last century sits under 25.
Speaking on-air with 7Cricket, Ponting highlighted that Labuschagne's glaring weakness is his inability to score off the back foot as this limitation gives bowlers an immensely generous margin for error.
Labuschagne, who registered scores of 1 and 31 during Australia’s shock 9-wicket defeat in the first Test at Darwin, was bowled by Shoriful Islam after a delivery deflected off his thigh pad.
“Well, look at this Aussie team and the selectors, I admire what they’re trying to do with Marnus. I admire that they tried to get him and get him back to his best, but it’s been way too long now. And I’m on record as saying I would have made that change at the start of this series because I think there was enough evidence for me to suggest that he was a long way from rediscovering his best,” Ponting said.
“And he’ll look back at today, he was unlucky, there’s no doubt about that. But that tends to happen to you as well when you’re struggling, and you’re trying to find some form and some rhythm. The worry that I had with him, I think there’s some technical deficiency there, but he’s making the margin for error for the bowlers too great,” he added.
Ponting then elaborated on Labuschagne’s difficulty playing efficiently off the back foot, an aspect of the game that had brought him great success in the past.
“With the length, he can’t score off the back foot. If you can’t score off the back foot in Test cricket, then batting becomes a hard game. That’s the great difference between when he was at his best and when he was three or four years ago, when he’s averaging 65-68 for a test year. That was when he was scoring off the front foot and the back foot. I think the bowlers now know that they can run in a bowl anywhere from almost 10 metres to about four metres on off stump and out as wide as they want and he can’t hurt them,” Ponting stated.
“So I well and truly think it’s time to have a look at somebody else. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one for making a panic change just because we lost last week. It wasn’t about that. The guys that I played with would tell you that I’d do everything I could to keep them on my side. I didn’t want to make a change, but when something stretches out as long as it has now, and it’s well over two years since he’s made a Test match hundred. If the numbers aren’t there, I was all about just picking on talent. And we’ve seen it work in the past. There has to be one, two, three, four guys out there that when you watch them bat, they just make batting look that little bit easier than the others,” he remarked.
As many as 18 wickets fell on Day 1 of the Mackay Test. Despite the batting collapse, Australia managed a first-innings lead of 101 runs after Mitchell Starc (6/12) ripped through Bangladesh's batting lineup to dismiss them for just 64 runs