Ponting Wants Big Payback

Try as he might, Ricky Ponting cannot quite brush off the suggestion that this Ashes series is all about payback. Australia do not merely want to beat England; they want to crush them badly.

"If we win here the series is over," he said yesterday. "But I don't think any of us is going to be happy with winning three Tests when there are still two to go. Over the years we've seen what's happened when we've been in front and have dropped one or two games late. There's enough hunger around the team to make sure that doesn't happen again."

There was a hint of Steve Waugh about the way he moved swiftly on from praising the batting of Paul Collingwood and Kevin Pietersen to rattling off an inventory of English failures.

"Flintoff hasn't had an impact with the bat yet," he said. "We've had Strauss under wraps a bit. Cook hasn't damaged us much. Bell's got off to a few starts but has got out for 50s and 60s, so he'll be disappointed with that. They can probably bowl better than they have as well. Harmison's got one wicket and Anderson's got two. You just have to expect that they will play well at some point.

"Maybe if they had started the first Test in Brisbane the way they had started the first Test at Lord's then they might have carried on coming at us. I like to think we're coming at them pretty hard and they're reacting to what we're doing rather than the other way round. So far we've just been a little bit too good."