Ricky Ponting, the 2005 Ashes and the Slow End of an Era

Eras rarely announce their endings. The Australian side that dominated cricket either side of the millennium looked, in July 2005, as strong as it had ever been: holders of the Ashes for sixteen years, world champions in both formats that had a trophy, and 1-0 up after three days at Lord's. Eight weeks later Ricky Ponting stood on the outfield at The Oval watching England collect the urn, the first Australian captain to lose an Ashes series since Allan Border in 1986-87. It was a two-run margin in one Test and a three-run swing of luck in another, and it was also, seen from a distance, the beginning of the end of something much larger.

The series Australia arrived favourites to win

The 2005 tour began with Australia beaten in a Twenty20 and then by Bangladesh in a one-day match at Cardiff, results treated at the time as curiosities. Lord's restored the natural order — Glenn McGrath took nine wickets and Australia won by 239 runs — and the assumption hardened that England, for all their improvement under Michael Vaughan, would fold as they always had.

Edgbaston changed the series and, arguably, the decade. McGrath trod on a stray ball during warm-ups and damaged his ankle, and Ricky Ponting chose to bowl first anyway. England made 407 on the first day. The decision has followed Ponting ever since, and he has conceded it was wrong; what tends to be forgotten is how close it came to not mattering. Chasing 282, Australia were 220 for 9 when Brett Lee and Michael Kasprowicz took them to within three runs of winning before Kasprowicz gloved Andrew Flintoff's short ball behind. A two-run defeat, the narrowest in Ashes history, in a match his side had been given no right to be winning.

Old Trafford: the captain's innings

The third Test at Old Trafford produced the best rearguard of Ponting's career. Set 423, Australia began the final day needing survival rather than runs, and lost wickets steadily around their captain all day. Ponting batted for close to seven hours for 156, pulling and driving through a fielding side that had crowds locked outside the ground, and was ninth out with four overs remaining. Lee and McGrath survived the rest. It was the only century by an Australian in the series, and it is remembered — unusually for a great innings — as part of a defeat delayed rather than a victory won, because England's celebrations of the draw told both dressing rooms who now held the initiative.

Trent Bridge extended the pattern of fine margins. Australia followed on for the first time in seventeen years, and Ponting, run out for 48 by a direct hit from substitute fielder Gary Pratt, gave the series its most famous flashpoint, gesturing furiously at the England balcony as he left. He was fined for it, and the image — a captain losing composure as the ground shifted under him — became shorthand for the tour. England won by three wickets, and a draw at The Oval, secured around Kevin Pietersen's 158, took the urn.

What 2005 actually cost, and what it bought

The scale of the response is what separates this defeat from an ordinary one. Australian cricket treated 2005 as a systems failure: preparation, fitness and planning were rebuilt, and the squad returned home with a list. When England arrived for the return series in 2006-07, Australia won 5-0 — the first Ashes whitewash since 1920-21. Ponting made 576 runs in the series, including 196 at Brisbane in the opening Test, an innings constructed with a visible, cold-eyed thoroughness that his 2005 batting, Old Trafford aside, had lacked.

The revenge, though, had a bill attached. Within weeks of the whitewash, Warne, McGrath and Justin Langer retired together, and Damien Martyn had walked away mid-series. Adam Gilchrist followed a year later. The 2006-07 sweep was not the era resuming; it was the era's farewell performance, and Ponting spent the remainder of his captaincy leading the aftermath.

Leading the decline

Captaining a great side and captaining its successor are different jobs, and Ponting's record splits cleanly at the 2007-08 season. With Warne and McGrath he lost occasionally; without them Australia had to learn how to lose regularly. The bowling attack cycled through replacements — Mitchell Johnson, whose own arc from erratic to devastating is a story in itself, was the best of them — and the batting aged in place.

The 2009 Ashes in England was lost 2-1, another series of fine margins in which Australia held the better statistics and England held the moments. The 2010-11 series at home was not fine margins at all: England won 3-1 with three innings victories, the heaviest home Ashes defeat of Ponting's lifetime, and Ponting himself managed 113 runs in four Tests before a broken finger ended his series. Three Ashes defeats in three attempts as captain — 2005, 2009, 2010-11 — is the line critics reach for first, and no amount of context fully files it away, though it is fair to note that no Australian captain since the 1890s had been asked to defend the urn in England three times with three different attacks.

His last major act as one-day captain was the failed defence at the 2011 World Cup, where he signed off with a hundred in the quarter-final defeat to India — the tournament that ended the unbeaten run built across 2003 and 2007. He resigned the captaincy days later, at 36, with the side ranked well below where he had found it and the honesty to say so.

The ranks years: an ending done properly

What followed was quietly one of the most admired phases of his career. Great captains often make poor former captains; Ponting made an excellent one. He batted at four under Michael Clarke without a word of public complaint, mentored the batters replacing his generation, and in January 2012 made 221 against India at Adelaide — proof, for one last summer, that the eye had outlasted the era.

The end came quickly after that. A lean run against South Africa in late 2012 persuaded him that the side was carrying him, and he announced his retirement before the Perth Test in December, finishing with 168 caps, level with Steve Waugh's Australian record. South Africa's players formed a guard of honour. He walked off with 13,378 Test runs, a figure examined properly in the piece on his batting record, and with the distinction — rarer than it sounds — of having chosen his own ending.

The second career

Ponting's playing time in the Indian Premier League was brief and thin: four innings for Kolkata Knight Riders in the inaugural 2008 season, then five for Mumbai Indians in 2013, where he began as captain, recognised his form did not justify the place, and dropped himself — handing the leadership to a young Rohit Sharma, who won the title within months. Standing himself down may have been his most consequential IPL contribution.

Coaching suited him better. He was head coach of Mumbai Indians for a title, spent six seasons building Delhi Capitals into a contender, took charge of Punjab Kings, and became one of the sharpest analysts on television in between. The competitive intelligence that had run Australia's slip cordon for a decade transferred intact.

What the era's end looks like from here

The temptation is to read Ponting's captaincy as a tragedy: the man handed a dynasty who watched it dissolve. The fairer reading is that dynasties dissolve on schedule, and the only question is who is standing there when it happens. Between 2005 and 2011 Australia lost, in sequence, the greatest leg-spinner, the most accurate fast bowler, the most destructive wicketkeeper-batter and half a batting order from Australian cricket's strongest generation. No captain replaces that; he can only manage the descent, and Australia under Ponting never fell out of the world's top handful of sides.

The 2005 series itself has aged into something neither country expected: England's greatest modern triumph, and simultaneously the making of the mature Ponting. The captain who bowled first at Edgbaston was still learning the job. The one who stood at Old Trafford for seven hours, who rebuilt the side's professionalism for 2006-07, and who handed over the wreckage in 2011 with his dignity attached, had learned it thoroughly — just in time to preside over the hardest years the job had offered anyone in a generation. Eras end. This one ended slowly, and Ponting absorbed most of the cost of it so that the next one didn't have to.