Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting has heaped praise on Pakistan’s superstars Babar Azam and Shaheen Shah Afridi, as he is eagerly looking forward to the upcoming multi-format series between Australia and Pakistan in March 2022.
Australia is set to travel to Pakistan in March-April, nearly 24 years after the last time the two teams met in Pakistan, to play three Tests, three ODIs, and a one-off T20I, and Ponting said he can't wait to watch the exciting series between the two teams in Pakistan.
After Australia’s Pakitan tour was officially confirmed on February 4, Ponting said that Babar and Shaheen Afridi would make the upcoming series a mouth-watering one. However, he was a little disappointed that the bowlers most of the time were given the Sir Garfield Sobers Award. Recently, Afridi won the Sir Garfield Sobers’ Trophy for Men’s Cricketer of the Year 2021.
Ponting told Isa Guha on the first episode of ICC Review Show: “The only thing I am disappointed with is it is not a batter -– how can these awards go to a fast bowler and not a batter? In all honesty, absolutely very well deserved. It’s an awesome achievement. Now with him, Babar, and some of the other fantastic players they’ve got in that Pakistan line-up at the moment it makes for a really mouth-watering series coming up when the Aussies go there.”
Recalling Afridi’s last tour of Australia in 2019 when he scalped just five wickets in two matches, the Aussie said: “He had a really good tour to Australia a couple of summers ago and you could see then -– he’s tall, obviously bowls fast, he had the ability to swing the new ball back into the right-handers as well… it looked like a really complete package that we hadn’t quite seen the best of yet.”
He added, “We had to do some stuff in a commentary this summer to pick out the top five batters and bowlers, and he wasn’t actually in my top five bowlers then, because he hadn’t played much Test cricket when we picked it. He was someone I brought up at No.6 because I knew about the amount of work, wickets, and great games he had behind him coming into December when we picked those groups.”
Speaking about Azam, Ponting recalled the tour of Australia in 2019 where the Pakistan captain scored a fighting 104 in the second innings of the first Test at Brisbane and 90 runs in the second Test at Adelaide. He said of Babar: “He’s the same as Shaheen. I don’t get to see a lot of these guys outside of when they tour Australia, but when I saw Babar in the second innings in Brisbane in the first Test against Australia, some of the shots that I saw him play on a fast bouncy Brisbane pitch – both on the front and back foot - against Hazlewood, Starc, and Cummins - it was like, ‘I have heard a lot about him and I have seen a fair bit of his while-ball stuff, but this guy is the real deal.”
Ponting signed off by saying, “He has been great in T20I cricket in the past as well, hasn’t he? His white-ball cricket has been nothing short of breathtakingly good for the last four-five years. I think I said then that for this guy, the sky is the limit. It’s only a matter of time I felt before he was going to be either the No.1-ranked Test batter in the world or certainly challenging for it. He’s probably challenging for that position right now and probably if he had played a few more Test matches through the last couple of years he’d be knocking the door down for that.”
(With IANS Inputs)
