Delhi Capitals head coach Ricky Ponting gave his honest take on Prithvi Shaw’s poor form in the ongoing season of Indian Premier League. Shaw has been a big disappointment for the Capitals this season and has scored just 47 runs in 6 matches at an average of 7.83. The talented opener has not been able to register a half-century in the last 13 IPL innings (including the last season). With their current position at the points table, Capitals had to take the tough call of dropping him from the XI for their last match against Sunrisers Hyderabad.
Ahead of the home tie against SRH, Ponting indicated that the Capitals won’t include Shaw in the XI for the next few games and will try the other players.
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“I think it’s 13 games (considering IPL 2022 as well) since Prithvi has made a 50 opening the batting for the Delhi capitals. There are a lot of other players at the top of the order with other teams that are playing a whole lot better than Prithvi,” Ponting said ahead of the team’s match against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Saturday.
Interestingly, on the eve of the SRH clash, Shaw was not seen batting in the main nets for the batting session but was part of a few fielding drills.
“Prithvi at his absolute best… we know he’s a match-winner. That’s one of the reasons that he’s a retained player because we know if he bats a certain amount of balls, we win about 95% of the games,” Ponting said. “But so far this season, he hasn’t been able to produce,” Ponting further added.
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The legendary Australian captain suggested that it was not an easy call to leave a promising star like Shaw out but they don’t want an out-of-form player at the opening spot.
“I think the six games that he played was just over 40-odd runs, so that’s not what we require right now. So is it a tough decision to leave him out but hopefully the team that we put on the park tomorrow can go win another game for us,” said the head coach.
Meanwhile, Ponting said that Shaw worked hard on fitness at the NCA and he had high hopes for him this season but it didn’t work out as planned.
“When he arrived this year, he’d been at the NCA for quite a few weeks working really hard on his fitness he turned up in good physical shape and his work ethic and training and everything in the nets suggested to me that this might be just that big year for him but that hasn’t worked out just yet.”
While he also said Shaw might get a chance in the later stage of the tournament if the new combination doesn’t work.
“But saying that there’s a long way to go and if things don’t work out with our current top order, there’s no reason why he couldn’t be back in the team and hopefully can finish the tournament off really strongly,” Ponting said.
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