It won’t be an easy return for Smith & Warner ahead of World Cup, feels this Aussie legend

XtraTime Web Desk: It won’t be easy for Steve Smith and David Warner to come back in the Australian side fells former Aussie skipper Ricky Ponting.

Duo facing bans for 12 months as they were involved in the ball tampering incident.
“I don’t think it is much of a challenge internally around the players,” Ponting told cricket.com.au. “You’d like to think that those guys are having conversations now, so they’re not leaving it to the last minute and just be exposed to this thing that could be derailing to a team.

“I’m sure this would have been talked about at a higher level for a long time – how do we integrate them back in? How do they fit in? How is it all going to be seamless?

“But the hardest part for those guys is going to be the public perception of us, especially in England.

“They’re coming back into a World Cup in the UK – they shouldn’t be expecting too many pats on the back over there.

“They’re going to cop it everywhere they go. They’ve got to know that, they’ve got to accept that and understand that.

“The team needs to as well, because that could also be something that could be unsettling for a team.”
The Aussies got a brief taste of the stick they might cop at the World Cup during their six-game limited-overs tour of the UK last year, with some fans at The Oval bringing ‘4’ and ‘6’ cards printed on yellow sandpaper into the ground, a crude reference to the foiled Cape Town ball-tampering plot.

Smith and Warner weren’t named to play in Australia’s final World Cup tune-up in the UAE, an upcoming five-match series against Pakistan, despite their bans elapsing before the fourth ODI in Dubai.

But it was confirmed this week that the pair will link up with the squad in the Middle East, ahead of their Indian Premier League stints, in which they’ll turn out for Rajasthan Royals (Smith) and Sunrisers Hyderabad (Warner).

Ponting, who lost just two of the 29 World Cup games in which he was captain, forecast that both may be taken aback by the level of animosity that accompanies their comebacks.

And stressed that runs will be their best defence against it.
The Aussies got a brief taste of the stick they might cop at the World Cup during their six-game limited-overs tour of the UK last year, with some fans at The Oval bringing ‘4’ and ‘6’ cards printed on yellow sandpaper into the ground, a crude reference to the foiled Cape Town ball-tampering plot.

Smith and Warner weren’t named to play in Australia’s final World Cup tune-up in the UAE, an upcoming five-match series against Pakistan, despite their bans elapsing before the fourth ODI in Dubai.

But it was confirmed this week that the pair will link up with the squad in the Middle East, ahead of their Indian Premier League stints, in which they’ll turn out for Rajasthan Royals (Smith) and Sunrisers Hyderabad (Warner).

Ponting, who lost just two of the 29 World Cup games in which he was captain, forecast that both may be taken aback by the level of animosity that accompanies their comebacks.

And stressed that runs will be their best defence against it.
From a purely on-field perspective, the returns of Smith and Warner to the one-day side had looked like they could not come soon enough during the side’s recent run of losses.

But Australia’s recent performances in India, where they’ve followed two tight ODI defeats with a pair of clutch victories to set up a series decider on Wednesday, looks to have increased competition for batting spots in the World Cup squad of 15.

Ponting has admitted concern over the way Australia have played spin in the middle overs during their barren recent stretch in ODI cricket, though the likes of Usman Khawaja, Peter Handscomb, Glenn Maxwell and even newcomer Ashton Turner have all thrived in the ongoing series against arguably the most potent spin attack in the world on their home turf.

Warner and Smith’s quality will be hard to ignore; between them, they have 22 ODI tons, the same number of hundreds Australia’s entire squad in India have put together.

But bedding down an effective game-plan to match it with the world’s best while also reintegrating two players who will have missed 14 months of international cricket by the time their World Cup opener against Afghanistan arrives looms as one of Ponting’s major challenges in new role.
“If you look at the way the best teams go about it, (how) England and India go about it now, they tend to go particularly hard at the top of the order,” Ponting said of Australia’s rivals.

“England especially go really hard to a point where (only) if it gets to like a three or four for 50 then they’ll have (Eoin) Morgan or even (Jos) Butler to come in the middle order and slow things down a little bit and keep wickets in hand. And then try and explode at the end again.

“I haven’t spoken in depth with Justin about that (strategy) yet, because we haven’t been exactly sure about what our team line up is going to be. There’s still a big question around Warner and Smith and do they come straight back in.

“Until we know the answer to that, we don’t know what our style of play is going to be, because you could have guys that are not quite as skilled … in those positions that those guys are going to bat in.

“But once we know if those guys are coming back in, I’ve certainly got a pretty clear picture in my head of the way I’d like to see this team play through the World Cup.”