Ricky ponting ps2 game

In challenging conditions and world-class bowlers up against substandard techniques, then you get what happened [at the MCG]. The fallout has started with speculation on the positions of captain Joe Root and head coach Chris Silverwood while there has been no lack of soul-searching about county cricket and whether it is producing players ready for Tests.

Ponting feels one solution could be to introduce the Kookaburra ball in the County Championship, emulating how Australia adopted the Dukes in to help prepare their batters for the Ashes.

As soon as Ponting made the analysis, Ben Stokes bowled a full delivery and cleaned up Green. Now again, Ponting has come up with a superior prediction in the recently concluded fourth Ashes Test in Sydney on Sunday. Cummins decided to hand over the bowl to his deputy Smith. Although, the potential game-changing moment was already predicted by Ponting, who was on air at that time. When Smith was approaching to bowl the delivery, Ponting prophesied that the New South Wales cricketer should drop the ball on the footmarks near the batter to gain the maximum advantage.

This is because the fielding controls in Ricky Ponting 07 once again require a touch of interactivity not to mention luck when it comes to throwing the ball at the stumps and catching in the outfield or behind wicket. The mini-game comes in the form of a reaction-time button press - just like the kind you find for driving the ball in old golf games.

When the needle hits the middle of the meter, you have to nail that button or your hapless man in white will fumble the catch like some reserve player for Bangladesh, or throw the ball horribly wide of the stumps. It certainly makes matches a little less predictable - there's nothing quite as enjoyable as playing a friend and seeing them stuff up their golden chances in the field, for instance - but it becomes obvious that the catching meter is still too blindingly fast for simple catches and it leads to a lot of frustration.

The darn thing literally pops up on the screen and vanishes again in the blink of an eye, even if the ball is coming straight down your throat. Where this really hurts is behind the stumps. When the batsman nicks the ball, you've only got a split second to catch what would normally be a regulation take for a decent wicketkeeper.

Getting someone caught behind starts to become frustratingly difficult, so we can't help but feel this side of the game still needed a bit more work - like maybe a sudden slow-mo if the ball is nicked, to give you time to play the reaction time mini-game. We have to wonder if this feature was tested thoroughly. What we do like, however, is the ability to return the ball to either the keeper's end or the bowler's end when fielding.

In fact, you can even hear your teammates call out for you to return it to a particular end, which is a really nice touch. If you get your timing down, your fielder will hit the stumps with a direct hit, whereas a sloppy return gets dropped by the keeper or even misses entirely him entirely, resulting in overthrows. In this respect, there are a nice variety of animations to appreciate - at least for the first few days of play. Fielding should probably be even more interactive than it is in this game, but at least it's not just an automated affair as it was in Cricket Swordfish Studios are onto a good system here, because it's clear that virtual cricket needs a lot more of these fun little elements to add an extra dimension to the repetitive work of bowling or repeatedly trying to loft the ball over the rope as the batting side.

Let's hope they continue to work on it and bring us something far more functional and compelling the next time around. Being an "official" ICC World Cup and Champions Trophy game, all the real player names and likenesses only exist in these particular tournament modes.

Exhibition matches and tests are still populated by Bizarro cricket players with names like B. Hugg Brad Hogg and M. Huscarl Michael Hussey , although you can go into the custom team editor and change their names if you really want. Of course, Ricky Ponting is still Ricky Ponting in all modes. It is his game after all. Bowling gives you a couple of options; just enough to keep you engaged well into the innings.

Each bowler can add a bit of spin, off-cut, swing the ball and throw in some special deliveries like bouncers and yorkers, but the real key is to find that perfect line and length.