Australia legend Ricky Ponting has piled into Joe Root and insisted he has only himself to blame if his bowlers didn’t deliver what he wanted.
In a stinging attack on the England captain, Ponting questioned why he was even doing the job if he couldn’t get his bowlers into line.
As a famously no nonsense captain himself in the great tradition of tough Aussie leaders, Ponting found it astonishing that Root didn’t use the tools at his disposal to get what he wanted out of the likes of Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad.
And it is not the first time that the Aussie record run scorer has taken aim at Root, calling him a ‘little boy lost’ on the previous Ashes tour owing to the mild mannered way he came across in public.
“I nearly fell off my seat when I heard that," said Ponting in response to Root’s comments about his bowlers.
"Whose job is it then to make them change? Why are you captain then?
"If you can't influence your bowlers on what length to bowl, what are you doing on the field?
“Joe Root can come back and say whatever he likes but if you're captain, you've got to be able to sense when your bowlers aren't bowling where you want them to.
"And if they're not going to listen, you take them off, simple as that. Give someone else a chance that is going to do it for you.”
Captains down the years have not been afraid to take bowlers to task in very public ways on the field.
Perhaps the most memorable was when Allan Border had a stand up row with Craig McDermott on the 1993 Ashes tour and threatened to send him home early with the line ‘don’t f***ing test me mate.”
Ponting on cricket.com.au added: “You have a really strong conversation with them on the field to tell them what you need. That's what captaincy is all about.
"Regardless of whether they have taken 1150 wickets between them – well, too bad.
"'I need you to bowl differently here to how you bowl in England, I need you to bowl differently to how you bowled four years ago, and if you're not willing to do it then I'll find someone that can' - that should have been the conversation five overs into day one.
“If they’d had that conversation maybe the result could have been different."
