Ponting's lengthy Asian lesson

In the aftermath of Australia's defeat in Pallekele there has been a raft of advice about how better to tackle the spin threat posed by Rangana Herath and Lakshan Sandakan. Ian Chappell and Ashley Mallett have had their say, so too Allan Border and even Simon O'Donnell.

A more contemporary figure with plenty of learnings about how to deal with spin bowling in Asia is the former captain Ricky Ponting, who had to learn the hard way through successive poor tours of India in 1996, 1998 and 2001. Like many Australian batsmen, Ponting did not take to the task naturally, and has admitted his troubles stemmed from a lack of suitable practice at home.

"What was difficult about working on playing spin in Australia in the off season, particularly in Adelaide, was, we were doing it all in the indoor nets and it was so false," Ponting told ESPNcricinfo in 2013. "You could run down the wicket without any fear at all of getting stumped or one spinning past the outside edge. You just had the freedom to hit the ball wherever you wanted to.

"In the nets there I was a pretty good player of spin, but when you got out into the middle on Adelaide Oval or the SCG, where it used to spin a lot, against two of the country's best spinners [Tim May and Greg Matthews] it was a different game altogether. It was right-arm offspin out of anything that troubled me the most."

Eventually, Ponting sought the advice of Indian players, notably Mohammad Azharuddin, who spoke about reading and dealing with length as the most critical weapon in a batsman's armoury when facing spinners on turning pitches.

"On the truer wickets it was okay because you could get away with it, but the one thing I learned about playing spin in India ... the first couple of tours were horrible, but the last few tours I had there where I actually understood what I was trying to do a bit better, I actually had some success," Ponting said. "It was all about not getting trapped to good-length balls. Not trying to predict where the ball was going to spin to. It was about trying to hit it before it spun or [well] after it spun, and that's what the good Indian players always did.

"That's a concept that Australian batters don't have to think about because the ball doesn't spin very much in domestic cricket here. Even our current blokes, if you look at the struggles they had against [Graeme] Swann in the last Ashes series, it was because you're just not brought up seeing and playing quality spin, and more importantly playing it in conditions that actually favour the bowler. Even with our practice facilities in Australia you don't get that very often."

The concept of not getting trapped to a good length ball should resonate with Australia's players, given the high number who fell lbw or bowled in Pallekele. Decisive footwork, either forward or back, is important to reading length, as Ponting saw from Azharuddin, MS Dhoni and others.

"If you watched the way he played, he was always out in front, flicking his wrists, and for us that was so foreign," Ponting said. "Dhoni does it really well as well. He's not actually a great player of spin bowling but he's got the technique there where they work the ball around and never get caught at bat-pad or done on length. When we go there we always get caught at bat-pad because we're predicting where the ball is going to go.

"But yeah, I first heard it from [Azharuddin], he talked about getting to it on the half-volley before it has the chance to spin or get back in your crease and wait for it fully spin and play it from there. It sounds pretty easy but it's difficult to do in the heat of battle against good quality spin bowling. But the technique makes a lot of sense."

By way of a cross-reference, the former Test off spinner Gavin Robertson was counselled in how to bowl on the subcontinent by Erapalli Prasanna. Revealingly, Prasanna's advice centred upon using length, accuracy and changes in pace to stop decisive footwork, and lock batsmen on the crease to good length balls - just as Ponting had been advised to try to avoid.

"Prasanna talked about how you've got to understand a batsman," Robertson said. "You want to try to lock the batsman on the crease with the amount of spin you've got on the ball and your pace and dip. You've got to combine that to make sure the batsman feels like if he leaves his crease to take a risk, it's going to drop on him and he'll lose the ball.

"So he'll search quickly to defend, and that will cause him to feel nervous about leaving his crease, and that'll start to get him locked on his crease. Then you'll get him jutting out at the ball and jabbing at it with his hands. Then he'll start trying to use his pad and his bat together to negate a good ball. Finally he said, 'All you have to do is get that right pace and create that feeling, and then you have to do it for 20 or 30 overs in a row, and you'll bowl them out.'"

If these lessons are hardly new, or especially revelatory, they appear to be forgotten by successive generations of Australian cricketers. As Robertson put it: "You could almost have all those learnings on a whiteboard or some sort of document that relays 'This is the plan for this, we know what we've been up against before, knock it over'. We probably haven't learned from those past tours."