preparation

Am I wrong, or is this pretty un-Australian? It definitely is not like the Australia I have known/seen for a few years now. What sense could it make for Ponting to defend his captaincy prematurely, even if it could be practise for a week later? It smacks of insecurity to me. Like last week’s issue, this is not about whether he is to blame or not. It is about why he is talking about it to begin with.

And this one seems really garbled to me:

"I said as early as the second Test I probably wasn't as sharp at changing
momentum at different times and being as defensive when I needed to be,"Ponting
said. "You go in on what you think is right at the time. I'm not a great one at
looking back and analysing previous Test matches or previous innings and picking
out what I've done well or what I haven't done well because I actually feel I'm
doing the right things at the right times in the game."

So he says that
a. he knows at one point he wasn’t decisive enough with the field changes.
b. yet he will not look back at tests and analyse what he’s done because he believes he is doing all the things that matter, at the times they are needed.

In other words, he says he is the first to acknowledge he wasn’t sharp enough, but actually he has done everything right, so no looking back required here.

Um…what, again?