Captain's Diary 2006: Australia's Road to the Battle for the Ashes

Captain's Diary 2006: Australia's Road to the Battle for the Ashes

by Ricky Ponting and Geoff Armstrong

HarperCollins, HK$255

Top-level cricket once had a place for those who struggled to remember which end of the bat to hold. They were the writers and commentators who captured the romance of the game, or at least kept the broadcast going between balls with talk of the weather, patronising nods to the genius of their statistician and rundowns on the sandwiches at the lunch buffet.

For better or worse, these uncoordinated entertainers began to be edged out of the commentary box and the sports pages about 25 years ago by retired cricketers who substituted playfulness with hardened, naysaying analysis on the state of play.

In the past few years, however, the likes of Tony Greig and Ian Chappell have become about as interesting as an Ashley Giles over, delivering the same line for decades, and they began to be forced onto the back foot by cricketers who were still playing. Steve Waugh was among the first to show that by keeping his interviews to terse post-match comments - saving his reflections instead of handing them for free to feature writers - and by taking a few photographs while on tour, he could turn out dozens of books. They were so successful that, since retiring, he has yet to appear in the commentary box.

Ricky Ponting replaced Waugh as Australian captain and poet laureate of the pitch. This is a man who admits in Diary that he had to look up Bangladesh on Wikipedia before this year's tour to the subcontinent. After sitting through an inspiring speech by Bishop Desmond Tutu, Ponting says he realised playing back-to-back tests is hardly worth moaning about. He made a mental note to read his signed autobiography of the Nobel Peace Prize winner he'd come across for the first time.