Ponting wants Australia T20 coach job

Cricket365
February 10, 2018

Former Australia skipper Ricky Ponting has expressed his desire to coach the national T20I side in a single format role.

Ponting has been assisting the T20I side in the Trans-Tasman Tri-series against England and New Zealand where Australia have so far gone unbeaten.

Australia booked a place in the series final that will be played at Eden Park in Auckland with a seven wicket win over England at the MCG on Saturday.

Speaking after hearing that he will be one of three inductees to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame this year, Ponting said: “I’m on record saying I’m interested in doing the Twenty20 job for Australia if it came up and I can make it fit in and work.

“There’s a few things I just want to get ticked off from CA first as far as how my thoughts are on how we can become a better, more explosive, consistent team.”

Ponting has already sounded out Cricket Australia about becoming the coach in the specialized shorter format.

He added: “I know Cricket Australia are looking down that path.

“I’ve been talking to CA for a little while about succession planning with coaching in the shorter forms of the game.”

Ponting supports the idea of separating the different formats with distinct coaches who will be able to work parallel to one another.

He said: “CA have done a great job making sure Darren’s had a series off here and there just to keep him fresh.

“The hard thing, you look at what’s just happened in the last one-day series, put all the eggs in one basket and get prepared for an Ashes series for so long and nail that.

“Then before you know it the one-dayers are upon you and we’re taking a similar group of players into that, that are probably a little bit tired and jaded and just having achieved something pretty special.

“England go the other way with a fresh group and a whole new lot of bowlers and a different team and they achieve the result they achieved.

“The planning side of it as well is one thing that has to be given the right amount of time to make sure you’ve got the players and the planning done for each series as well as you can, and even having been around this group the last couple of weeks, how busy Darren and the coaches are is quite amazing, and that’s only around the one form, not thinking about anything else.

“There are challenges there for players and there’ll always be challenges there for coaches but it’s probably inevitable that there will be different white-ball coaches to red-ball coaches as this game keeps developing.”