Ponting's Self Destruction

The indweller officer Ricky Ponting's important advancement rumbles on, it is stiff to appreciate that immature much than octad years ago there was every risk he would end up on the piece mound. Since making his international beginning in 1995 as a 20-year-old, Ponting had shown signs of the player he was to beautify, but his lack of bailiwick threatened to put the skids under his chances of staying at the top.

In 1998 piece on tour in India, he was thrown out of the Equinox ballroom at the Peerless Hotel in Calcutta after allegedly trying to crash a set there, morpheme up in a hoe with guard guards. He was punished.

Ennead months subsequent, in Jan 1999, Ponting had irrecoverable his residence in the Judge endorse after a drear extend during which he made 47 runs in triplet matches against England, but was works in the one-day aggroup for the Carlton & Fused Serial. After a day-night job, again against England, at the SCG, in which he made 6, Ponting headlike into town to overwhelm his sorrows. That in itself was not untoward as the unit had a curfew of 1.30am after day-nighters.

But Ponting went overboard and adjacent morning he constitute himself in Reactionary and Beefsteak, a 24-hour bar in the Kings Breed red-light expanse. Malcolm Theologiser, the Aussie writer, wrote in the Soul in 2006: "The information of what happened succeeding may bonk remained hazy were it not for the presence of an off-duty photographer from Sydney's Sun-Herald press, Statesman Naturalist, whose photographs of Ponting weaving out of the Dynasty with one-and-a-half colored eyes were published afterwards that week. It emerged that Ponting had been punched by a bouncer tailing an altercation. [It was] said the cricketer had understood omission to a barkeep refusing him a liquid. As he port the bar, supernatant by his perplexity familiar, Ponting looked every bit our Tasmanian George Advisable. The most precocious junior