Crash Course

It was one of the sadder sights of recent times. There was Australia's best young cricketer, Ricky Ponting, his face marked by embarrassment and a black eye, seated at a bare table next to the Australian Cricket Board's chief executive Malcolm Speed.

Against the beautiful backdrop of Hobart's harbour, Speed announced that Ponting had been suspended for two one-day internationals for misbehaving at a Sydney nightclub. Ponting admitted he had a drinking problem. He and Speed explained it wasn't that Ponting drank too much too often, but that when he started drinking he found it hard to stop - and often got himself into compromising situations. Ponting said he would seek counselling.

It looked at the time, January 1999, as if the board was hanging Ponting out to dry, when previously it had tried to protect players in trouble. We soon learned it had little choice. A Sydney newspaper was poised to publish photos of a drunk and dishevelled Ponting standing outside that nightclub with a group of people he didn't know.

Here was the classic morality tale of modern cricket. The wonder boy, seen by many as a future Test player from the time he was 12, had now been exposed as a flawed character with a destructive social problem, someone who had embarrassed the game and himself in public. Here, too, was someone regarded as a future Test captain, someone who was now jeopardising that future.

That is how it appeared at the time. But when you talk to some of the people involved back then, you realise that few lost faith in Ponting's ability to mend his ways and recover the lost ground. They knew their man pretty well. Ponting's impressive past two years prove it.

The following season the Australian vice-captaincy was up for grabs. Adam Gilchrist won a three-way "contest" over Shane Warne and Ponting, then 24. Although many insiders believed the latter two were better candidates in a pure cricketing sense, Gilchrist got the nod because of his impeccable public and private image. The board, wearied by the misbehaviour of some players - especially Warne - took the safe route.

Ponting's path to the captaincy had hit a roadblock, a crossroads. Not only was the nightclub affair the lowest point in his career and life - for the two have been much the same for a cricketer destined from an early age to play for Australia - it was also the turning point in that career.

As Ponting underwent counselling and gradually straightened himself out, Warne continued to get into scrapes, forever damaging his leadership prospects. Gilchrist, meanwhile, found the triple duties of captaining, batting and wicketkeeping too onerous. Eventually Ponting got his chance.

Even then his supporters in the highest levels of administration had to push his claims against the long entrenched view in New South Wales and Victoria that, as the senior states, the captaincy should be theirs by right. And yet since taking over the one-day side Ponting has commanded Australia to a World Cup victory, made consistently high scores and generally led in fine style. It has been quite a turnaround for a kid from the tough northern suburbs of Launceston.

Ponting grew up in a sporting family and played cricket for an uncompromising club, Mowbray. What the Mowbray players lacked in subtlety and worldliness they made up for in grit. It was not the most sophisticated environment but it did help make Ponting a determined character, a fighter. One of the ways of life in that environment was for young players to be left to learn on their own. There was little advice from senior men about how a youngster should behave in public. The view was that this kid could play - so let him get on with it.

In the short term that approach landed the young Ponting in trouble. Perhaps in the longer term it worked for the best. These days, those who watch him at close quarters say he is self-reliant, a quiet and close observer, who prefers to learn from watching rather than asking. They also say they never lost faith in his ability to come through 1999 and go on to better things.

"It's not obvious how Ricky learns," says David Boon, the national selector and former Test batsman. "You don't have to sit him down and go through things with him. He picks things up from watching and listening. You don't see him do it but he's learning all the time."

Boon is a key figure in this story - first as a figurehead to Ponting, and secondly as a former team-mate and colleague. Boon's role in Tasmanian cricket cannot be overstated: he doesn't have a statue of himself at Hobart's Bellerive Oval for nothing. He was the first born-and-based Tasmanian Test player, the one whose ambitions and talents were not thwarted by the casual cricketing environment of the early 1980s.

Like Ponting, Boon was a star from an early age, a kid destined to go places. But unlike other gifted Tasmanian players of that time, Boon kept his eye on the main game. He liked a joke and a drink but he never stopped being professional.

There were few senior mentors in Tasmanian cricket when Boon was coming through, no former greats who might turn up to state training to have a word with the next generation. You had to do it pretty much on your own, and Boon broke new ground by doing exactly that. Denis Rogers, chairman of the Tasmanian Cricket Association and a former ACB chairman, cites Boon as a key factor in Ponting's development.

"Boonie is still Ricky's hero," says Rogers. "Not because they are necessarily close but because of what Ricky has seen Boonie do. David has been a major influence but it's never what he says - it's what he's done, and how he went about doing it. David doesn't say a lot but when he does talk people listen."

Boon, naturally, plays down this view. "I think Denis is exaggerating there," he says. "Ricky and I talk quite a bit and we did play together for a while. But I don't interfere in anything. I leave him to do his job, which he's doing very well." Boon says he didn't take Ponting aside during that difficult period in 1999 because he had confidence in him.

"I never doubted he would come through that episode," says Boon. "He's got plenty of strength of character. You have to remember he saw leaders like Allan Border, Mark Taylor and now Stephen [Waugh] up close, and I know he watched them and learned from them.

"He's always been an outstanding talent but not all talented players are leaders. Ricky has always shown leadership qualities. And it showed great guts to admit he had a problem with drinking. He had the perceptive skills to identify the problem and the guts to do something about it. People forget he was young and in the limelight, and when you're young you do a few stupid things. As you get older you learn from your mistakes. Ricky realised he had to sort himself out - and I knew he would."

That enforced self-reliance during Ponting's early years has turned into a positive in recent times. Boon says no player has been a particularly close influence on him. One of his strongest supporters, however, has been Trevor Hohns, the national chairman of selectors, who says Ponting stood out years ago as a "shining light".

"Apart from the fact that he was a fantastic player, to me he exuded enthusiasm," Hohns says. "He's had a deserved reputation as a good tactical thinker, and all of this was pinpointed a few years ago. I wouldn't say we had long-term plans for him as early as 1999 but we did have our eye on him. Certainly in the past few years some of the rough edges have come off. He's taken the right sort of advice from the right people and gone out of his way to make the best of himself."

Hohns notes that Ponting has had the same manager for several years, unusual in someone whose career rose so quickly. "I think Sam Halvorsen has been a good influence on Ricky and helped him adjust to the public exposure players face these days." Ponting has had to deal with it more than most. From that tough club environment at Mowbray he graduated straight to the academy in Adelaide, making him perhaps the first fully fledged youngster to move through that exclusively cricket system.

A feature of Ponting's leadership has been his stance on sledging, which seems stronger than that of the Test captain Steve Waugh. When South Africa's Graeme Smith went public about the crudity of Australia's sledging, Waugh implied it was part of the rough-and-tumble of Test cricket. Ponting took a harder line. "I don't mind a bit of the friendly banter and gamesmanship," he said, "but I've said right from the word go that I don't like, and won't like, any real personal barrages towards anyone. And if that does happen I'll be more than happy to pull the guys aside and let them know that's not acceptable."

Hohns believes Ponting's stronger condemnation of excessive sledging was influenced by those dark days of early 1999. "I think the origins of his views on sledging were influenced by that issue. It made him aware of the public view players are under. They're just normal people like us but they have had to realise that they're famous. If they do something wrong people will see it. He realised back then that, to some extent, he is public property."

After a series of minor and major disasters caused by the poor behaviour - or perceived poor behavior - of this Australian team, Ponting's rise to the leadership has been an under-recognised positive story. Those people, like Hohns, who spotted his strength of character years ago are now seeing their faith repaid. Ponting is the best fieldsman in the game, one of the very best batsman and a World Cup-winning captain. He will soon be a fine Test captain.

As Rogers says: "Ricky's come a long, long way."