Ashes 2023: Ricky Ponting Contrasts MS Dhoni’s and Ben Stokes’ Capability to Win Matches
Even though England may have lost the second Ashes Test to Australia by 43 runs, Ben Stokes’ 155 off 214 balls propelled them to the verge of triumph. In fact, Ricky Ponting, a rival, has praised it for that same reason.
The former captain of Australia compared MS Dhoni, another well-known captain, to Stokes in terms of his ability to win matches.
He hadn’t terrorized Australia for the first time. He scored an unbroken 135 runs in the 2019 Ashes, which helped the home team win by a miraculous one wicket in Leeds.
“I think any international player is under pressure anytime they walk out to play, but Ben batting in the middle order or later order like he does, probably finds himself in more match-winning opportunity situations than some others might,” Ponting remarked on the most recent edition of The ICC Review.
“The first player that comes to mind is perhaps someone like Dhoni, who is there at the end in a lot of T20 games and finishing games, whereas Ben is doing it at the end of Test matches. There aren’t, probably not many, many players throughout the history of the game that have found themselves in that sort of role and are there at the end winning games, and especially as a captain.”
Ponting said that throughout the dramatic last day at Lord’s, he was thinking about Stokes’ match-winning century at Headingley.
“I thought and everyone probably thought he could do it again because we’ve seen it happen before, but this was probably, slightly more runs that they were chasing (in 2019),” he said.
“Once it started playing out the way that it did and how many parallels there were to Headingley in 2019, I think everyone had it in the back of their minds,”Steve Smith let him go…and Marcus Harris ditched him at Headingley on 116, so those kinds of demons from the past started resurfacing.
