'Sachin Was the Leader of the Pack': Ponting Heaps Praise on Legend for Revolutionizing Test Cricket

The beauty of Test cricket holds a special place in the pantheon of sports as one of the most finely preserved, and traditional formats of the game established its place of relevance in the modern era too.

Just the sight of the whites is enough to send onlookers on a nostalgic journey of times bygone and reacquaint themselves with the most orthodox format of the game. The revamped style of the World Test Championships breathed new life into the five-day affair during times when action-packed T20 franchise cricket seems to be growing exponentially.

Ahead of the much anticipated WTC Final at the Oval between two of the most illustrious Test-playing sides, India and Australia, Star Sports brought together an expert panel worth of envy comprising of the skippers of the team set to battle it out for Test supremacy, Rohit Sharma and Pat Cummins, alongside certain legendary names such as former Australian skipper par excellence, Ricky Ponting, legendary Pakistani pacer Wasim Akram, former New Zealand captain Ross Taylor, former England batting stalwart Ian Bell and former Indian player and coach Ravi Shastri.

The discussion centered around the encounter between the two team teams in the rankings in the ongoing cycle to determine the finest Test-playing nation on planet Earth at this particular point in time as Cummins and Rohit seek to get their hands on the prestigious Test mace.

Expert analyst Harsha Bhogle quizzed Ponting about the characters and personalities who have made Test cricket stand out, citing the examples of the greatest batsman of all time Sachin Tendulkar, and West Indies stalwart Brian Lara.

Bhogle asked Ponting, “It has always been like that. There was Sachin, Lara and you. Imzamam was in the group as well. Is there a rivalry between you as well that the public catches up?”

The World cup winning Aussie said, “The public probably do, as players you aren’t thinking about it much.”

“When I was coming through, everyone was chasing Sachin. Sachin was the leader of the pack by a fair margin because of his overall Test match batting technique,” he added.

“It sort of made him stand out more than most. And that wasn’t just in India, it was in every country he played in,” Ponting elucidated.

He also mentioned South African all-rounder Jacques Kallis’ Test career as a shining example.

“Kalis is probably the other one you can put into the group. You have a look at his batting numbers, I think he’s made 45 Test hundreds and has scalped 300 wickets. (To have) Either one of those is a good career, let alone being able to do both,” Ponting opined.

“And I think countries that are struggling at times need that one shining light. They just need that one hero to make the game cool again. To make the kids want to go and play the game again,”

The storied Australian batsman cited the example of Lara’s retirement and the resulting slump in the interest in Test cricket in the West Indies as an example.

“When Lara finished up playing for West Indies is when the interest in the game over there seemed to drop off a little bit because their star player wasn’t there.”

“We’re lucky that all the players that you mentioned in the current group or the group that I played in led from the front. They led the way for the younger generation of players to come through,” he emphasised.

The WTC Final is slated to begin on the 7th of June at the Oval in England.