Ponting puts Australia on right path

Peter Roebuck believes Ricky Ponting can look back with satisfaction upon his team's performances this season. A side shattered by the Ashes defeat at The Oval, with poor selections and calamitous run-outs rubbing salt into the wound, might easily have gone awry, Roebuck writes in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Ponting is entitled to feel that most of the gaps have been filled. Australia has found its opening pair. A year ago, Shane Watson was a struggling player already with an unreliable body. Now he is a forthright opener and an adaptable seamer able to deliver probing stump-to-stump swingers of the sort that proved so effective at Bellerive.

Not so long ago Simon Katich was a battling first drop in Shield cricket. Now he is his country's senior opener. At last, too, Katich is starting to bowl. The last time both Australian openers took wickets in a Test match was in 1994-95 but it was a fluke. Suffice it to say that Mark Taylor and Michael Slater have much to offer, none of it at the bowling crease.

Mike Coward says in the Australian it has been the inevitability of the result which has made Hobart a disappointing Test match.