Ponting questions Sri Lanka's slow approach

Ricky Ponting, the Australian captain, has criticised Sri Lanka's slow approach to batting in the first match of the VB Series that Australia won by 116 runs at the Docklands Stadium in Melbourne.

Ponting said that he didn't understand why Sri Lanka held back Mahela Jayawardene and Marvan Atapattu to No. 6 and 7 when Sri Lanka were chasing 319 for victory. "They had to come out with their best players at the top of the order and try to get off to a flying start if they were any chance of winning the game, and they actually went the other way," Ponting told ABC Sport. "I'm not sure if they were trying to get some of their experienced players some time in the middle and some runs under their belt, but I think the runs that were scored by Jayawardene and those guys late in the game were pretty cheap runs anyway."

Michael Vandort, playing his first match, came ahead of Jayawardene and Atapattu and crawled to 48 off 117 balls. "It [Vandort's innings] was a bit strange," said Ponting. "Especially considering he's their Supersub, you'd probably expect a bit more out of him. But he's probably a young guy trying to find his feet. I'm not sure if anyone on their side got a lot out of their batting tonight to tell the truth. To bat their 50 overs out for 200 - I'm sure they'll be disappointed with that and a lot of the crowd will be disappointed as well."

Attapattu agreed that Vandort had to adopt a more positive game. "If he [Vandort] was to play the game again I'm sure he'd have a different approach," he said. "We wanted to have wickets in hand when you're chasing a big total like that and when you lose a couple of wickets very early then someone has to go and occupy the crease. The occupying of the crease went a bit too long I guess and it really wasn't the way that we wanted to end the game, it was one of those days."

Inspite of Sri Lanka's capitulation, Ponting praised Australia's performance. "All the guys were really keen today to make sure they got whatever out of the game they could, and you know fairly early into our bowling innings we were always going to win the game. But the boys stuck at it and they were trying to do their best as well as we possibly could, and everyone's got a lot of pride in their performance and that's what it comes down to and we did that well tonight."