It was quite fortuitous that the last time Ricky Ponting appeared in an IPL match as a player, it was against a team that he would go on to coach in his first IPL final in 2020: Delhi Capitals.
Fate, however, would have been the last thing on Ponting’s mind in the summer of 2013 at Delhi’s Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium, against a team then known as the Daredevils. Aside from the immediate fate of the team that was captaining that season, of course, which turns out to be the same team whose downfall now plans for Tuesday’s final, Mumbai Indians.
That Kotla night, Ponting didn’t come out to bat. After four consecutive single-digit scores in his first season for Mumbai, the captain had demoted himself in batting order from starter to game number 7, before demoting out of eleven for the remainder of the season. . But this drastic move only led to a coaching career.
Together with then-head coach John Wright, Ponting guided new captain Rohit Sharma to the title in 2013, the first IPL win in Mumbai. Sharma even invited the leader from the backroom to the podium to collect the trophy. Then two years later, in 2015, he replaced Wright as head coach and Mumbai won the IPL again, this time fighting from the bottom of the table after the first six rounds of the edition.
But even as Ponting and Mumbai fortunes skyrocketed, Delhi’s plummeted. They finished last in 2013 and 2014, second to last in 2015 and third from the bottom in 2016 and 2017. Even Ponting’s appointment as Delhi coach in 2018 did little to stop the rot – the franchise finished last again.
Still, the campaign witnessed an important aspect of Ponting’s first season in Mumbai. Midway through the shaky 2018 season, Delhi captain Gautam Gambhir left the eleven and handed the reins to Shreyas Iyer. Ponting, of course, approved. “Having been in the same situation many years ago… I would like to congratulate Gautam for putting his team ahead of him,” Ponting said at the time.
He might as well have been the coach of Australia’s T20I, had the ball handling incident not occurred (it was Ponting who insisted that Justin Langer take charge of all three formats). Perhaps this helped him focus all his energies on Delhi in 2019, a season that presented Ponting with a clean slate.
Everything in this Delhi was fresh; the owners, the name and, most importantly, the key faces of the team. Shikhar Dhawan had more than 500 runs, Kagiso Rabada finished with 26 wickets and even Ishant Sharma, who had not sold in the previous auction, contributed 13 hairs and called Ponting “the best coach I have ever met”.
The 2019 campaign saw Delhi make their first play-offs in seven years and finish second, their best result until Ponting took them a step further this year. “I’m probably more tactically up-to-date with this trend in this (format) than any of the others,” he said in an interview with cricket.com.au.
Part of that tendency is accepting that the coach is the unanimous leader behind the scenes. Iyer may be the captain on the field, but look at any of the videos of the Delhi locker room that has flooded the internet this season and it is evident that he is just one of the guys, clapping and yelling as Ponting hands out badges to top artists who don’t. they were honored with the Man of the Match.
In one of those videos after Delhi reached the 2020 play-offs, Ponting said: “Well done guys. As for me, the IPL starts now. ”He then waited for the room to disperse, but the players froze when one of the season’s rising stars, Anrich Nortje, rose to speak.
With his face more serious and against a background of silence, Nortje shook his head and said, “The boys wanted me to have a chat with you.” The shock on Ponting’s face was palpable, until Nortje pressed a plate of his own into the coach’s palm. “Out of all the guys, we want you to have this,” Nortje said, causing Ponting to blush and then hold it up with the pride one would reserve for a trophy.
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