Ponting – 10,000 and still strong by CricketArchive

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Player:

RT Ponting

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DateLine: 7th June 2008

 

Ricky Ponting reached the milestone of 10000 runs in Test cricket and in the process became the seventh cricketer, and the third Aussie to do so. He joined an illustrious list of cricketers that included Sunil Gavaskar, Allan Border, Steve Waugh, Brian Lara, Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid before him.

 

However, Ponting was very unfazed about the number of runs that he had scored; what mattered to him was the fact that he survived this long in international cricket.

 

This is what he had to say, “The thing I've always said I'm most proud about is probably my longevity in the game. As a top order batsman, I guess if you play that many games, you're expected to get close on 10,000 runs.”

 

Ponting scaled this summit in his 117th Test match, and this was the second quickest in terms of the number of Tests taken by anyone to reach the milestone. Brian Lara is the only batsmen to have achieved it quicker; in 111 Tests. Rahul Dravid did it in 120, Tendulkar in 122, Gavaskar in 124, where as Border and Steve Waugh took 136 and 155 respectively. However, Ponting holds the record for the highest Test average at the end of the Test in which he reached his 10,000 mark. Ponting had an average of almost 59 – 58.81 to be exact – where as the next in line was Sachin Tendulkar who was at 57.58 at the end of that Test. Dravid was at 55, where as Steve Waugh is the only cricketer in this list to have had his below 50; he was at 49.45 at the end of the Test match.

 

If you talk about Ponting’s record itself, one needs to look at the graph below that depics his average over the period of his 10k runs. If one discounts the first ten matches – usually the time when a cricket finds his feet, scores runs, gets sorted out by opposition bowlers – Ponting’s average is on the rise. In the first thirty tests, Ponting’s average was around 40, where as, by the 50th, it had almost scraped the magical figure of fifty and come back to 40 again. It was only after this dip – and this was caused by the miserable tour to India in 2001, followed by an ordinary first three Ashes Tests – that the graph has almost never looked back for the great man.

Figure 1 Ponting's Average over his 10k runs

The career graph also shows that the average is yet to peak, it has maintained its upward trend, unlike some of the other cricketers like Tendulkar, whose mean has been fluctuating like a pendulum after his 100th Test match. Or even a Rahul Dravid who has tailed off in the last one year or so. Steve Waugh almost maintained a straight line graph in his last fifty or so Test matches, but then he had peaked out at an average of fifty only.

 

If you look at the breakup of his 10k runs, the first 1000 came in 17 Tests, the next in 15 and then in 17 again! This meant that Ponting had taken 49 Tests to score his first 3000 runs. In his next 51, he had scored another 5000, and 2k in the next 18! That speaks volumes about his “becoming of cricketer” in the latter half of his career.

 

Tendulkar, on the other hand, took 19 for his first 1000, and 45 for his first 3k – four less than Ponting – yet his 10,000 came in 122 Test matches, i.e. four more than Ponting, which is another testimony to the fact that Ponting has gradually improved – much more than what Tendulkar has.

 

Ponting also took almost thirteen years to achieve this landmark, where as Dravid was the quickest in this regard, making his 10,000th run in the 12th year of his Test career. Steve Waugh was at the other end of the spectrum when he took almost 17 years to reach this mark. Surprisingly, 2008 saw two cricketers reach this mark. Before Ponting, it was Dravid who had got to the 10k landmark, when he scored a century against the South Africans in the Chennai Test earlier this year.

 

Lastly, Ponting was the second youngest, after Tendulkar to get past this hurdle; he was 34, as compared to Tendulkar’s 32. The advantage that Tendulkar obviously had was he started playing Test cricket, six years before Ponting, and yet reached the mark only three years before Ponting. Dravid and Lara were both 35 when they reached their 10k, while Border, Gavaskar and Waugh were all in the 37-38 age bracket.

 

Statistically, Ponting’s 10,000 came in 195 innings, and he had scored 35 hundreds and 39 fifties in this period.