Ricky Ponting is at it again. This time, he has praised Virat Kohli. A few months ago, Ponting wondered how someone who has scored just 2 hundreds over the last 5 years, could still be in the squad. Now, he has said that Virat Kohli is the best 50 overs player he has ever seen. Both are good observations. I have no doubt about that. The closes competitors to Kohli in white-ball will be Michael Bevan and to some extent Michael Clarke. Bevan has also featured in a number of finishes but the one thing that is lacking from Bevan’s resume is that he wasn’t required to chase huge totals, something Kohli has done very often. Kohli has been averaging above 57 for a very longtime. It is simply unthinkable. Ricky Ponting and Kohli.
Ofcourse, he could be the best 50-overs cricketer ever. The point is not that. The point is the fans of Kohli or even Gambhir. Some months ago, Ponting said that “I saw a stat the other day about Virat, it said he’s only scored two (three) Test hundreds in the last five years. That didn’t seem right to me, but if that is right, then that is, I mean, that’s a concern,” Ponting said.
It was an honest observation. No one can deny the fact that Kohli is living on borrowed time. 5 years of brilliance in Test cricket added to the everlasting brilliance in white-ball cricket has ensured that he continues to be part of the squad despite a lean-trot that has defied every conventional wisdom. It simply is unfathomable how someone with such a lengthy poor patch is even allowed to be in the squad. Any other team, Kohli would have found himself playing first-class cricket atleast a couple of years ago. Hence, Ponting was correct. Every Kohli fan and infact even Gambhir lambasted Ponting for his comment.
Gambhir even went to the extent of asking Ponting to worry about Australia. Ofcourse, it is another case that they eventually went onto win the series handsomely. It was a harmless but honest comment by a commentator. Gambhir could have left it slide but instead he chose to teach a lesson to Ponting.
“Congratulations to him [Kohli]. He’s obviously been a champion player for a long, long time. And particularly, probably in the white-ball formats where he’s been an unbelievably good 50-over player,” Ponting said. “In fact, I think I’m on record before saying I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better 50-over player than Virat Kohli.
“With someone like Virat, you never write him off, because I’m sure he’d be motivated by that [achieving the record], I think,” Ponting said on the ICC Review Podcast. “Now that he’s gone past me and only two ahead of him, I’m sure he wants to give himself the best chance to be remembered as the all-time leading run scorer in the game.
Here, Ponting did not hold back when describing about Kohli but his fans or Gambhir does not have anything to say. It is not correct when you find holes in someone’s argument when he speaks the truth. Just like how Gambhir has kept quite now, he must not have responded to the question about Kohli’s lack of runs in Test cricket before the Australian series. Probably, Gambhir at that point was quite cocky. He must have thought that India will win the series before reality hit him really hard.
The bottomline is that, when someone states the obvious, just accept it and move on and do not react to it with absurd arguments.
