|| India Correspondent ||
The Head Coach of the Delhi Capitals team in the Indian Premier League, Ricky Ponting has recently opened up about the talented youngster Prithvi Shaw who had a great start to the IPL in UAE last year but failed to finish with it and eventually dropped in the later stages of the league.
While praising Shaw, he also shared the young talent's bizarre training midset too.
“I’ve tried taking Shaw under my wing the last two years and I’ve really enjoyed working with him. I’ve had some really interesting chats with him through last year’s IPL, just trying to break him down, trying to find out exactly what was the right way to coach him and how I was going to get the best out of him. But he had an interesting theory on his batting last year – when he’s not scoring runs, he won’t bat, and when he is scoring runs, he wants to keep batting all the time,” added Ponting.
Ricky Ponting has again shared that he was surprised at Shaw’s self-found theory of not doing practice in the nets when he was not getting any runs last season as well.
“He had four or five games where he made under 10 and I’m telling him we have to go to the nets and work out what’s wrong and he looked me in the eye and said, ‘No, I’m not batting today’ – I couldn’t really work that out,” said a surprised Ponting.
However, the former Australia captain hoped that Shaw had changed his mindset now and he will be seen in the nets more when out of form.
“He might have changed. I know he’s done a lot of work over the last few months, that theory that he had might have changed, and hopefully it has, because if we can get the best out of him, he could be a superstar player,” he revealed.
However, Prithvi Shaw had a sensational performance in the Vijay Hazare Trophy recently amassing a whopping 827 runs including four tons. Meanwhile, Ponting had already given his advice to Shaw a few months earlier during the IPL and hoped he will do well.
“I was going pretty hard at him. I was basically telling him, ‘Mate you’ve got to get in the nets. Whatever you think you’re working on, is not working for you’. It’s my job as a coach to challenge someone’s preparation if they’re not getting results. So I challenged him and he stuck to his word and he didn’t practice much at all towards the back-end of the tournament, and didn’t get many runs towards the back-end of the tournament either,” shared Ponting.
“Maybe his training habits have changed for the better, because his success won’t just be for the Delhi Capitals, I’m sure you’ll see him play a lot of cricket for India as well in the coming years,” said Ponting. “He’s diminutive … in the (Sachin) Tendulkar sort of mould but hits the ball incredibly powerfully off front and back foot, and plays spin really well. If we can get him to take that form that he’s just shown into the IPL, it just makes the balance on our Delhi Capital side so good.”