Not Too Late For Ponting's Teams To Start Believng

The Australians need to put away frowns and attack. Fear is corrosive and it’s not too late for the Australians to fight back. According to Peter Roebuck, writing in theSydney Morning Herald, a captain cannot be held responsible for everything. He is not a puppeteer, though by Leeds, Ricky Ponting might finally have a full deck of cards to play.

In any case, Australia need to stop contemplating their navels. Touring reporters have become frustrated at the way the team has gone to ground. Repeated requests for interviews with bowling coaches and players have been turned down. It is a bad sign. Apart from anything else, the game needs all the publicity it can get. This circling of wagons indicates a fragile state of mind. That needs to change.

Darren Lockyer and Ricky Ponting play different sports - rugby and cricket respectively - but are golden children from golden eras. At a time when the game is getting really tough for both men, can they maintain their zest for the game in teams which are a ghost of what they were? Robert Craddock draws up an analogy in the Courier Mail.

One of the most painful sights in sport is that of a champion struggling, which is why no one wants to really talk about Lockyer's form problems this year.

Like Ponting, he is such a gifted talent and a modest, unpretentious fellow that you feel like you are shooting Bambi when you mention the words "Lockyer" and "form slide" in the one sentence.

In his blog on the Herald Sun website, Craddock believes Australia should find room for Stuart Clark. If the Ashes are lost and given the pressure and penetration he can cause, he didn’t get a game, it would be a crying shame.

There are few more magical sights in cricket than high-class seam and swing bowling of the sort that James Anderson and Graham Onions produced at Edgbaston. When such mayhem unfolds, the game appears to be played under different physical laws. Modern Test cricket is all too often a batsman's game but when the ball starts to swing, it does not matter how flat the pitch, how big the bat or how great the reputation, the bowlers are turned into conjurers and batsmen clowns, writes Simon Wilde in theAustralian.