COLOMBO, March 20: Ricky Ponting like any other Australian hates losing but on Saturday he was not too perturbed about the defeat which terminated the world champions’ 34-match winning streak since it came at the preliminary stage of the World Cup rather than the knockout phase. The Australian captain claimed Pakistan’s four-wicket victory at the R. Premadasa Stadium won’t hurt his side ahead of the quarter-finals and will help them work on the grey areas before the crucial games.
“We can now go back to being normal as any other team. The pressure [of maintaining the proud feat] is now gone. To be honest, I don’t think the loss will hurt us at all,” Ponting told reporters at the post-match media conference.
“Our guys have not even been thinking about the winning streak at all because it hasn’t been mentioned at any stage in our change-rooms or team meetings.”
He conceded that Australia were up against a resurgent Pakistan side on the day and were simply not good enough to prevent the rivals from clinching the top spot in Group ‘A.
Looking ahead, Ponting said his team would be ready to face India or any other side. “We have played [against] a good Pakistan side and came up short. This will get all the guys assessing just exactly what they need to be thinking about and the way to play and win World Cup games,” he opined.
“We found ourselves in some tough situations in this game and weren’t good enough to get out of them. We have to learn from this result and learn quickly, because if we are to face India in Ahmedabad, then you can rest assured the same situations would pop up again. We will have to handle them a whole lot better than we did tonight [Saturday].”
Ponting, one of only two players in this match — the other being Pakistan all-rounder Abdul Razzaq — who figured in the 1999 World Cup game Australia previously lost at Headingley, admitted Australia were unable to rotate strike as they would have liked.
“It is a fact. We were not able to rotate the strike well enough when [Mohammad] Hafeez was bowling. He was the one man to put the brakes on us the most. It built up pressure which can cause batting collapse [last six wickets going down for 42 runs] like we suffered,” he conceded.
“You must give credit to Pakistan for the way they bowled. Certainly we can learn a lot from the experience how you have to do to play spinners well and how to rotate the strike a bit better.”
Ponting lamented the lack of support to Brett Lee, who was brilliant in this game, was the main reason for the loss.
“Basically I thought our fast bowlers would be most dangerous on a wicket which a bit up and down. Shaun Tait in particular I thought would get us the wickets we badly needed, but wasn’t to be because the match never going to last the full distance of the Pakistan innings.”
