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Follow UsOn July 13 (Saturday), the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Delhi Capitals announced that Ricky Ponting will no longer be their head coach, bringing an end to his seven-year-long stint. How did his tenure go at the franchise?
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Built the Indian core
When Ponting joined the Capitals set-up in 2018, the first thing he did was strengthen the Indian core. In the 2018 IPL, Rahul Tewatia, Mohammad Shami, Prithvi Shaw, and Avesh Khan were added to the squad alongside the retained Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer. He added more to the list as the Capitals signed Axar Patel in 2019 and then Kuldeep Yadav in 2022.
If you want to win the IPL, you need a good Indian core, and Ponting identified that during his initial years at the franchise.
Shaped Pant into a leader
When the Capitals were facing the problem of who to promote as captain after Shreyas Iyer got injured, the idea to groom Rishabh Pant as a leader instead of giving it to some senior player was a masterstroke. Pant repaid the faith by leading them to the playoffs in his first season as captain in 2021. DC reached the playoffs with a stellar record, winning 10 out of their 14 games, topping the table.
Since then, Pant has also gone on to skipper the national side in ODI cricket and has been seen as a long-term successor for the Men in Blue.
Resurrected Kuldeep’s career
When Kuldeep struggled big time at the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), DC bought him for INR 2 crore. According to Kuldeep’s childhood coach, Kapil Pandey, Ponting was the biggest confidence booster for the left-arm wrist spinner.
“Ricky Ponting told him ‘I am going to play you all the matches. There is a reason Warnie (Shane Warne) likes you and I can see why. You are going to be our matchwinner,” Pandey told the Indian Express.
After joining the Capitals, Kuldeep picked up 21 wickets in 2022, 10 in 2023 and 16 in 2024, which is the polar opposite to his last two seasons at KKR in which he had a combined 5 wickets. He could not even make it to the playing XI in the 2021 season.
Smart overseas signings
Another major success of the Ponting era was the way the Capitals made shrewd signings. They signed Marcus Stoinis and Shimron Hetmyer from RCB in the 2020 IPL season, who helped the Capitals reach their first-ever final in IPL 2020.
DC's move to sign Anrich Nortje also turned out to be a masterstroke. The South African tearaway wasn't in DC's initial squad, but he made a major impact for the franchise after coming in as a last minute replacement for Chris Woakes. It didn't end there, even in 2024, the 2020 IPL finalists signed Australian prodigy Jake Fraser-McGurk as replacement for Lungi Ngidi. Fraser-McGurk turned out to be one of the league's best signings.
Not to forget that they also snapped up the South African finisher Tristan Stubbs for his base price of INR 50 lakh. Both these signings were instrumental in DC's turnaround in the second half of IPL 2024.
Misses
Disastrous cycle post 2022
One of the major drawbacks of the Australian legend as coach of the Capitals was his failure to capitalize on the momentum that was built. Despite the team making it to three consecutive playoffs between 2019 and 2021, they could not convert it into a title. In the 2022 IPL mega auction, the franchise lost the plot and failed to make it to the playoffs in that entire cycle.
Messing up in the 2022 mega auction
While the Capitals under Ponting were poised to peak after the mega auction in 2022, they made some very weird signings. They bought Khaleel Ahmed and Chetan Sakariya for huge sums while both had the same role to play. They even had Mustafizur Rahman in the team making it three left-arm pacers, as they struggled to come up with a plan to fit all of them.
Continuing with this weird process of picking an imbalanced outfit, they got Rilee Rossouw, Mitchell Marsh, David Warner and Phil Salt - all top-order players - playing at the same time.
The list doesn't end there, they also had a talented core of Indian top-order batters, including Shaw, Yash Dhull, Manish Pandey and Priyam Garg. Once again, there was the problem of plenty, and with no Pant in the side to control things, it got worse, as they finished ninth on the table in IPL 2023.
If there were too many similar bowlers in 2022 and batters in 2023, the Capitals managed to create a melee of wicketkeepers in IPL 2024. They had Rishabh Pant, Kumar Kushagra, Abhishek Porel, Ricky Bhui and Shai Hope as wicket-keeping options, and they played almost three of them together in every other game.
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