Aspirational Indian opener Prithvi Shaw had a disappointing season in the previous edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Delhi Capitals (DC) opener only managed to amass 228 runs from 13 games at a dreadful average of 17.53.
Not only that, Prithvi then experienced a terrible outing in Australia when he donned the whites during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2020-21. He played two innings and only managed to score 4 runs.
However, the right-handed batsman came back to form in the recently concluded domestic season. In fact, several cricket fans and experts hailed Prithvi’s outstanding batting in the Vijay Hazare trophy 2021. He led his state Mumbai to the final against Uttar Pradesh and won the competition. The Mumbaikar scored 827 runs from just 8 matches at a breathtaking average of 165.
Prithvi is now preparing hard in the nets of Capitals’ camp for the upcoming fourteenth season of the cash-rich league and will be hoping to have a good run in the tournament. But, ahead of IPL 2021, DC head coach Ricky Ponting has revealed how he struggled to bring the best out of Prithvi in the past couple of IPL seasons.
Ponting stated that the young Indian star had some interesting views concerning his batting that he did not fully understand.
“I’ve tried (taking Shaw under his wing) the last two years, and I’ve really enjoyed working with him. I’ve had some really interesting chats with him through last year’s IPL, just trying to break him down, trying to find out exactly what was the right way to coach him and how I was going to get the best out of him,” said Ponting as quoted by cricket.com.au.
Ponting cited an example from IPL 2020 where Prithvi struggled to score runs. The former Aussie skipper said that he suggested the batsman do net practice in order to improve, but the 21-year-old refused to participate in practice sessions.
“But he had an interesting theory on his batting last year when he’s not scoring runs, he won’t bat, and when he is scoring runs, he wants to keep batting all the time. He had four or five games where he made under 10, and I’m telling him, ‘We have to go to the nets and work out (what’s wrong)’, and he looked me in the eye and said, ‘No, I’m not batting today’. I couldn’t really work that out,” added Ponting.
“He might have changed. I know he’s done a lot of work over the last few months, that theory that he had might have changed, and hopefully, it has, because if we can get the best out of him, he could be a superstar player,” stated the 46-year-old.
The Tasmanian revealed that he did not approve of Prithvi’s tactics, stating that he was ‘pretty hard at him’.
“I was going pretty hard at him. I was basically telling him, ‘Mate, you’ve got to get in the nets. Whatever you think you’re working on is not working for you. It’s my job as a coach to challenge someone’s preparation if they’re not getting results. So I challenged him, and he stuck to his word, and he didn’t practice much at all towards the back-end of the tournament and didn’t get many runs towards the back-end of the tournament either,” concluded Ponting.
