Team India registered a historic win over Australia in the 1st Test of the 4-match series at the Adelaide Oval. Soon after the game, former Australian captain Ricky Ponting pointed out that a number of deliveries by Indian pacer Ishant Sharma in the match were no-balls. But the fact that they were overlooked on multiple occasions goes on to show the lack of no-ball monitoring on the umpires’ behalf.

The issue was raised when Aussie opener Aaron Finch was given out to Ishant on the fourth day of the Adelaide Test as the hosts were batting their second innings. He decided to review the lbw decision and it showed that the Indian fast bowler had overstepped and thus modified the original decision by the umpire Kumar Dharamsena.

Finch was later on dismissed by Ravichandran Ashwin after making a meager score of 11 off 35 balls. But the previous incident did cast a light on how the on-field umpires were lenient with their calls on the front foot no balls. As per the quotes in cricket.co.au., Ponting said, “I’ve said this for a lot of years; I honestly don’t think the umpires look at the front line anymore.”

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Ponting said that there were other deliveries as well from Ishant which should have been called, and some were as plain as the daylight. It only means that the umpires are simply not looking at it.

Former skipper further added, “Some of the ones we’ve seen… he was 4-6 inches over the line. I don’t think the umpires are looking and I certainly don’t think they were looking at those ones because they were blatantly obvious ones. As we know now, they’ll only ever look at them if a wicket falls, which as far as I’ concerned is not right.”

Surely, there can be mistakes, but calling no-balls is a very important aspect of umpiring, and when a bowler steps around six inches over the line, it is not something that can be simply overlooked, in Ponting’s opinion.

Ricky Ponting further stated, “Part of umpiring is to get the no-ball decisions right as well. I’m not asking for everything to be spot on, but if you’re six inches over then surely you can call it. If I was the fielding team, I’d want to know. If I was Virat Kohli and I knew that my bowler was bowling a no-ball more often than not, I’d want to know that so I could pull that back in line.”