Former Australian captain Ricky Ponting has compared Ben Stokes’ match-winning ability with the legendary Indian captain MS Dhoni, who is hailed as the best finisher the game has ever seen. Ponting belives that Ben Stokes excels at handling pressure more than most of his current contemporaries.
During the second Ashes Test match against Australia at Lord’s, Stokes played like a lone wolf and dragged his side over the line with a brilliant century that included a record-breaking nine sixes.
However, this wasn’t the first time that Stokes has scared Australia with his brilliance. The star all-rounder produced a similar performance during the 2019 Ashes series in England when he smashed an unbeaten 135 runs to help pull off a remarkable one-wicket victory over Australia.
Ricky Ponting Compares Ben Stokes To MS Dhoni
Speaking on the latest episode of The ICC Review, Ponting showered praise on Stokes. He said:
“I think any international player is under pressure anytime they walk out to play, but Ben batting in the middle order or later order like he does, probably finds himself in more match-winning opportunity situations than some others might,”
He added: “The first one that comes to mind is maybe someone like a Dhoni, who’s there at the end in a lot of T20 games, and finishing games, whereas Ben’s doing it at the end of Test matches, and there’s not, probably not many, many players through the history of the game that have found themselves in that sort of role and are there at the end winning games, and especially as a captain,”
Ponting also revealed that Stokes’ match-winning innings at Headingley from four years ago was at the back of his mind during his performance in the final day at Lord’s. He said:
“I thought and everyone probably thought he could do it again because we’ve seen it happen before, but this was probably, slightly more runs that they were chasing (in 2019),”
“In the back of everyone’s minds, I think once it started playing out the way that it was and how many similarities there were to Headingley in 2019…Steve Smith dropped him…and he was dropped on 116 by Marcus Harris at Headingley, So, those sort of ghosts of the past kept coming back out.”
Numbers Don’t Do Justice To Stokes’ Talent
Further, Ponting acknowledged that Ben Stokes has a remarkable ability to influence games at a level that don’t do those modest numbers justice. He said:
“We have all over the years really only sort of judged cricketers on their numbers and their stats of what their average is and how many wickets they take. If you looked at Ben Stokes in that light only, it doesn’t do him full credit to the player that he is as he averages 35 (36) with the bat and 32 with the ball,”
He added: “So those numbers alone don’t sort of put him in the highest echelon of players. But when you see him play like he did (at Lord’s) and do some of the things he’s done for this team over a long period of time, then we have to find ways to start measuring cricketers in a better way of how they impact games, how many games they actually can win themselves because he’s an out and out match-winner, that’s for sure,”
