Ricky Ponting eager to coach Australia in T20s

Ricky Ponting is interested in becoming his country’s Twenty20 head coach should Cricket Australia (CA) opt to appoint separate leaders for the Test and limited-overs formats.

Darren Lehmann currently coaches Australia in all forms, with Ponting assisting his former team-mate for the ongoing T20 tri-series with England and New Zealand.

After being named as one of three inductees into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, Ponting spoke of his desire to take on a head coach role for Australia in T20.

The ex-Australia skipper, who has coached Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League, was quoted by ESPNCricinfo as saying: “I’ve been talking to CA for a little while about succession planning with coaching in the shorter forms of the game.

“I’m on record saying I’m interested in doing the Twenty20 job for Australia if it came up and I can make it fit in and work. There’s a few things I just want to get ticked off from CA first as far as how my thoughts are on how we can become a better, more explosive, consistent team.

Legend. pic.twitter.com/qT9L8NY3wq

— cricket.com.au (@CricketAus) February 10, 2018
“It’ll be interesting to see how coaching does go. It’s hard work on the players as we know, and CA have done a great job making sure Darren’s had a series off here and there just to keep him fresh.

“There are challenges there for players and there’ll always be challenges there for coaches, but it’s probably inevitable that there will be different white-ball coaches to red-ball coaches as this game keeps developing.”