Team Delhi head coach Ricky Ponting has revealed that young India opener Prithvi Shaw refused to bat in the nets when he was going through a lean patch during the 2020 edition of the Indian T20 League.
The former Australia cricket team captain, who has been working with the 21-year-old for the past two seasons in the Delhi camp, stated that Shaw’s training methods baffled him and that he reckoned it stopped him from realising his massive potential.
"I've had some really interesting chats with him through last year's Indian T20 League, 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," Ponting said in an interview to cricket.com.au.
“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.”
Exclusive: @DelhiCapitals head coach Ricky Ponting hopes to unlock the "superstar" potential of Indian young gun Prithvi Shaw, but hopes some of his training theories have changed ahead of #IPL2021 | @LouisDBCameron https://t.co/QC6qWR793B pic.twitter.com/hyc4v47gC2
— cricket.com.au (@cricketcomau) April 5, 2021
Prithvi Shaw had struggled for runs in the last edition of the Indian T20 League, amassing just 228 runs in 13 matches at an average of 17.53, registering just two fifties in the tournament.
After being dropped from the Indian cricket team following a poor run of form in the Tests against Australia Down Under, the Bihar-born cricketer has made a strong case for a comeback after he became the first player to score more than 800 runs in a single edition of the Vijay Hazare Trophy.
Shaw tallied 827 runs in eight matches at a staggering average of 165.40, smashing four centuries this season, including an unbeaten 227 against Puducherry in the group stages which made him only the eighth Indian to score a double century in senior 50-over cricket.
“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,” Ponting added.
Meanwhile, Rishabh Pant-led Team Delhi will take on MS Dhoni’s Team Chennai in their opening encounter of the Indian T20 League 2021 at the Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai on April 10.
Feature image courtesy: AFP/Noah Seelam
