Ball change: Ricky Ponting calls for investigation

LONDON: Former Australia captain Ricky Ponting has called for the ball change which occurred during Australia’s second innings in the ongoing fifth Ashes Test at The Oval to be investigated, a move which he termed as a ‘huge blunder’.

After Mark Wood hit Usman Khawaja on the helmet with a bouncer on the first delivery of the 37th over, umpires Joel Wilson and Kumar Dharmasena changed the ball, citing that it had gone out of shape.

But the replacement ball looked newer than the previous ball, as Khawaja, David Warner and Marnus Labuschagne were dis-missed in quick succession in Australia’s chase of 384. “The biggest concern I have is the big discrepancy in the condition of the ball that was chosen to replace the one (that had gone out of shape). There’s no way in the world you can even look at those two balls there and say in any way they are comparable.” “At the end of the day, if you are going to change the ball, you want to make sure that you get it right, so (you make it) as close as you possibly can to the one that you’re changing it from.” “Now if you have a look in that box, there weren’t too many older-condition balls in there. There were some older ones that were picked up, the umpires looked at that and threw them back,” said Ponting on Sky Sports. (IANS)

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