Whose whingeing now?

Ricky Ponting has changed as a personality ever since he entered his 30s, got married and had a child. Hardly surprising, of course, because that's a pretty hefty triple-whammy dose of maturity to swallow so no wonder he 'sweats the small stuff' less than he used to.

But he does still have the occasional whinge which he'd be better off resisting. The trouble with whingeing when you're Australian is that it's supposed to be the Poms who whinge according Aussie folklore so, consequently, everybody and anybody who hears an Aussie whingeing makes a big deal of it.

Like when Ponting complained about the nature of the pitch at Centurion after his team had sneaked past Pakistan with a leg bye off the final ball of the match. It wasn't all he said at the post-match press conference but all the agencies began their quotes reports with the fact that Ponting had complained about the pitch.

Apart from anything else, why hasn't the Aussie skipper learned yet that nobody outside the playing XIs cares - even a tiny, tiny little bit - about what he thinks of the pitch. In fact, low-scoring thriller with a result off the final ball - give us more bad pitches!

It all sounds a bit precious, especially coming from a batsman's point of view. I wonder what Umar Gul and Brett Lee had to say about the pitch.

So, one-day cricket has become boring. For all the talk of dividing innings into two sessions of 25 overs or just reducing the whole match to 40-overs per side, nobody has yet mentioned banning the captain from talking about the pitch. It's one of the most tedious plagues in the game.

Barely two hours before Ponting's pitch-bitch, I was fortunate enough to be invited up into the KFC 'Dinner in the sky' box which was an awful lot of fun. 22 people suspended 100 feet up in the air watching the cricket from a long way behind long on hadn't bothered any of the cricketers from any country, I was assured by the host. Except one.

"Before the India vs Australia game we had a couple of Indian supporters who waved flags and sang along to the national anthem. We subsequently recieved several messages from the Australian changing room during their innings telling us that we were distracting the batsmen. Nobody else said a word," said our host.

Never mind. I suspect that Australia have got the bit firmly enough between their teeth now to win this tournament and Ponting, no doubt, will accept the trophy with good grace and thank the groundstaff for actually doing exceptional jobs at both venues in testing circumstances. Scores of over 300 were made at both Supersport Park and the Wanderers. And both venues witnessed close finishes. Doesn't sound like a problem to me.

If my head tells me Australia will win, my heart goes firmly for New Zealand. For a country with approximately two thousand times as many sheep as registered club cricketers, their record in ICC events is truly astonishing. There are 25 times as many clubs in Mumbai as there are cricketers in the whole of New Zealand.

Cricket doesn’t just fall behind rugby in the Kiwi sporting pecking order, it’s rated behind everything from sailing to rock climbing as a serious sport and, even as a pastime, most Kiwi men would opt for unusual facial hair growth and tattoos way before a game of beach cricket.

Go Daniel! You can do it.