Ricky Ponting on Steve Smith's technique, the Ben Stokes affair and whether England have blown the Ashes

“They were broken,” Ricky Ponting remembers. “You could see what effect it had on them. Little things. KP and Harmison were almost having punch-ups in the drinks breaks. Overthrows. There was something going on around their group. We knew then.”

Spending half an hour in the company of Ponting gives you a better, fuller insight of the game than a day with most other pundits. Ponting is one of those ex-players who can’t help being insightful, who turns on his knowledge and expertise as easily as a tap. And so whether he is talking about Steve Smith’s unique batting method, reflecting on the Ben Stokes affair or warning England about the impending car crash of their Ashes tour, it pays to listen.

Eleven years ago, in 2006-07, it was the remarkable win at Adelaide that first gave Ponting’s Australian team scent of a famous whitewash. It wasn’t just the fact that England were 2-0 down, it was the way they had gone down, scoring 551 and then capitulating on the last day. They were, as Ponting puts it, broken.

“It was probably the best Test win I was involved with,” he says. “They were the ones who could have put their balls on the line, scored quickly, given themselves long enough to try to bowl us out. Their mindset gave us a sniff. I remember telling the guys that night: ‘They won’t win a game.’”

The danger for the current England side is that once more, defeat at Adelaide will put the skids on. Most of them have never experienced an Ashes tour before, the alarming speed with which they can gather momentum, and a losing team can feel under siege. “Everything under a microscope,” is how Ponting describes this fixture.

“You have to make sure you have a really strong group, on the same page, or things can fall over quickly,” he adds. “Everything about you as a player and a person is magnified. Before the start of the series I said Adelaide would be England’s best chance of winning a game. Night game, pink ball, more grass on the pitch.”

Ponting does not quite write England off just yet. But he recognises the scale of the challenge facing Joe Root as he attempts to become the first captain in eight decades to win an Ashes series from 2-0 down. “He won’t be able to do it by himself,” Ponting says. “He needs all of his senior players. He needs Broad, he needs Anderson, he needs Cook right behind him, to drag all the young blokes along, let them know that this is what Ashes cricket is all about. It’s not going to be easy.”

On the Stokes issue, Ponting can sympathise. When he was a similar age, in 1999, he was banned for three matches for his part in a nightclub brawl that left him with a black eye and forced him to confront his relationship with alcohol. It was, he says now, “a turning point in his career”. And if Ponting could deal with his issues, so can Stokes.

“I’ve seen the video,” Ponting says of Stokes’s Bristol nightclub altercation. “It doesn’t look very good, does it? Yeah, it was the same for me. When you have the only thing you’d ever wanted to do taken away from you, as a young bloke, it makes you wake up pretty quickly.

“I could cope with the fact that I let myself down, and my family down. But the one thing I couldn’t cope with was not knowing what my team-mates thought about me. That was what hurt me the most. So I had to prove to them that I was going to change. It’s exactly the same with Stokes.

“He has to show them that he’s different than he was before this incident. They all know what he can do on the field. That won’t change. But he’ll have to gain their respect back, from what he does off the field. I don’t know him. But I reckon there’ll be a noticeable change in the way he is as a person, off the field.”

What Ponting managed to do so successfully was to curb his wilder impulses whilst still managing to harness the fire and the fury, the competitive instinct that made him one of the world’s greatest ever batsmen. He was never the most prodigious sledger, although he recalls an incident at Adelaide in 2005 where he was emphatically forced to eat his words.

“I learnt first-hand to stay away from Brian Lara,” he remembers. “He started his innings unusually in Adelaide, maybe 20 not out off 70 balls. I went past him and said, ‘You’re playing pretty well today, Brian, you’re smashing ’em’. An hour later, he’s 150 not out. He ended up signing a shirt for me at the end of the day, saying ‘thanks for keeping me going.’

“I think sledging’s highly overplayed. Forever and a day, there have been words spoken on a pitch. Very rarely these days does it get out of control. The planned stuff is never personal. And if it is, it’s normally shut down pretty quickly by players, or if the umpire gets wind of what’s going on.

“Steve Waugh used it in his favour, because he was someone who wanted to get it back. Quite often he’d go looking for it as well, if he hadn’t started his innings well, or felt a bit flat. Matty Hayden was a bit the same. If they didn’t feel they were in the contest, they’d start a bit of a tiff.”

In the same category, Ponting would insert Australia’s current captain Steve Smith, a man who has raised Australian batting standards to a level perhaps not seen since Ponting himself. It seems hard to credit that he first arrived in Test cricket, under Ponting’s captaincy, as a leg-spinner batting at No8. Ponting regards those early days with a certain bemusement now, as if he knew there was something there, but he wasn’t quite sure what.

“We knew he had batting talent,” he says. “In the net, every now and then, he would just do something differently. Someone would bowl him a short ball, and he’d hit it back like a tennis ball, straight back past him. And you would think, god, there’s some talent there. You’re not supposed to do that, but how did you do that?”

These days, in his role as a BT Sport pundit, Ponting’s job is to analyse Smith’s batting technique. And for all its quirks and shuffles and idiosyncrasies, Ponting sees a fundamentally sound method. “I’ve had a good look at it to break it down,” he says. “And if you hit the pause button on the point of release, he ends up being in some rock solid positions.”

I offer a comparison with Ponting himself, another batsman who liked to move across his stumps in order to disrupt the bowler’s line. “I didn’t take the stumps out of play too often!” he jokes. “Mine was a different technique to his. He’s back and across, a long way across.

“I liked to be forward and across, limit the margin of error for the bowler. I used to look down and picture an A4-sized piece of paper on the pitch. If he bowled the ball on that, I’d find it difficult to score. But if he was that side of it, I’d be pulling. This side of it, I’d be driving. But Smith’s theory is completely different.

“I actually think he’s a lot like Davey Warner. They both started as guys who were unorthodox. But they’ve been able to develop their own style of play, backed up by a very defensive game. Davey now has a rock-solid defence against the new ball, which he never had three or four years ago. Steve’s been very much the same.

“Look, he’s a young kid from New South Wales, and normally they have a bit more about them. He’s pretty quiet and driven about what he wants to become. He wants to be the best player of all time, and the best captain Australia has seen. And it’s pretty hard to argue that he’s not on a pretty good path right now.”

No Australian captain since Kim Hughes has failed to win an Ashes series. Smith doesn’t look like joining him on current form. And in Australia’s current strength, Ponting sees a side transformed from the shambles of the last year: the calamitous series defeat against South Africa, the consequent selection purge, the sense that Australian cricket as a whole was at rock bottom.

“There have been some tough times,” Ponting admits. “The player dispute and a change of selectors happened. But now we are on the right track. Our fast bowling brigade looks pretty good. There’s some talent with the bat. Handscomb and Khawaja need to work it out, which I think they can.

“But just watching the way they went about it last week, it’s pretty clear to me they have a good understanding of how important this series is for Australian cricket, and for their own brand. They had this big pay war, got all this money, and then went away and got beaten pretty quickly. The public turned against them then. This is a chance to get them back on-side.”

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