He has done enough to be one of the leading contenders for Cricinfo's Player of the Decade title, but Ricky Ponting himself will admit that over the last three years he has been significantly less than prolific. During a period in which batsmen have generally made merry, Ponting has scored only five hundreds in his last 32 Test matches - a rate of one every 6.4 matches - while the average has dropped to a distinctly ordinary 41.44. Contrast this with his stats in the first seven years of the decade - an average of 65.73, and a rate of a hundred every 2.81 Tests over 76 matches.
Due to this relative slump, Ponting's overall average has dropped around five points during this period. The peak point (in terms of end-of-match average) came after the second Test of the Ashes series in 2006, when he made 142 and 49 to boost his career average to 59.99. One more run would have lifted his average to 60, but he never reached that high thereafter, and over his next 34 matches it has fallen to 54.79. Ponting is far from finished as a top-class batsman, but it's unlikely his average will ever reach those peaks again.
A disappointing feature of his batting during these three years has been the inability to convert fifties into hundreds, a malaise that has afflicted the entire Australian team this summer. During his peak period, Ponting made 27 centuries and 26 fifties, but in the last three years he has scored almost three times as many half-centuries as centuries. The ratio of Tests to 50-plus scores isn't that different (1.43 then, 1.68 now), but the uncharacteristically poor conversion has meant the average has slipped significantly.
