Older, wiser but will Ponting be stronger?

Ricky Ponting faces some stiff challenges as he tours England four years after losing the Ashes. The current England team is shaping up well, while Ponting is without the big names and leads an inexperienced bowling attack, lacking a quality spinner, writes Simon Barnes in the Times.

True, Ricky does have a few people we have heard of in his team: Brett Lee, Stuart Clark, Simon Katich, Michael Hussey (although I would be wary of including anyone nicknamed “Mr Cricket”). The trouble is that these players have spent all their lives as No 2s, expecting others to carry the weight. The new reality of becoming alpha males will test these aged understudies.

Though how you understudy Warne is something nobody has worked out. Australia have decided that there is no point in even trying, and so they will contest the Ashes without any serious attempt at building an attack around spin. England have two spinners who can give the ball a decent rip.

Despite the absence of Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen, the rest of the England team appears to be coping well in the lead-up to the Ashes. Moreover, the 'big two' have a tendency to monopolise attention, which may sometimes prove unhealthy. Have England learnt to deal with their absence, and are the two players really indispensable, asks Stephen Brenkley in the Independent.

To conclude that it was only an insipid West Indies on helpful pitches in familiar conditions in a one-day series about which so few cared – all true – is to misinterpret the nature of the achievement. The pair are dominant figures in and out of the England dressing room.

They know their place and they recognise their worth. If they did not, they would be half the players. But it has been noticeable, and perhaps it has not been coincidental, that the other players to a man say how lovely it is in the England dressing room at present