Ponting wants players to deliver against SA

With South Africa close to usurping their No 1 status, Aussie skipper wants players to put their hands up in the ODI series

Ponting wants players to deliver against SA

With South Africa close to usurping their No 1 status, Aussie skipper wants players to put their hands up in the ODI series

Having lost two matches and won one in the five-match series, Australia find themselves in a precarious situation, following their 25-run defeat at Cape Town last Thursday. They must win this series to retain their pre-eminent position in one-day cricket.

Players missing
Handicapped by the absence of Brett Lee, Stuart Clark and Peter Siddle because of injury, the ODI world champions have been unable to curb the prolific South African batsmen, even as Nathan Bracken, Brett Geeves and James Hopes, put to the sword, have been impotent in providing support to brilliant pace spearhead Mitchell Johnson, who has been equally proficient as a batsman on this tour.

The Australian top batting order, too, has failed to deliver in the past three ODIs, with Brad Haddin scoring 53, 1 and 15, Michael Clarke 1, 5 and 35, Ricky Ponting 37, 8 and 20, Michael Hussey 83 no, 3 and 1 and David Hussey 18, 1 and 20.

Facing a must-win situation as they go into tonight's fourth game of the series at Port Elizabeth, Ponting told the media: "It's about all of us understanding what our roles are and performing our roles to the best of our ability all the time.

"Right at the moment we've just got too few doing that, and that's what is costing us the games. If you look at the Durban game (which Australia won by 141 runs), that's probably what we had there, more so on the bowling front than on the batting front.

"That was the trademark of our cricket in the Test series. We had guys putting their hand up and getting the jobs done when it was their turn to do that.

Need to go on
"In the last two games we've been too few guys trying to carry the load and win the game for the team. If you look at the last game, the top three all got starts 15, 20 and 35 - no one went on and got that big score.

"We do need more runs out of our batting full stop u00e2u0080u0093 it's just not just the top three," Ponting said.

"We just need a better and more rounded team performance. We've got to bounce back quickly now after losing two games in a row and there's no better place than Port Elizabeth."