Tuesday, September 18, 2001 The Punter has been poached. The Launceston lad is a lad no more. Ricky Ponting, likely Australian captain-in-waiting, is getting hitched and, although the news passed most non-Taswegians by last week, its significance for the future of Australian cricket is profound indeed.

To pretend otherwise is naïve. "Women have as much part in the life of cricketers as in the affairs of other males, always excepting film stars and champion prize-fighters," Ray Robinson decreed 26 years ago, and his words ring truer in today's hectic times than ever before. Look what happened to Michael Slater, Mark Butcher. Better, surely, to stay single and make sure your only domestic worry is that duck you made in the Pura Cup last week.

Not so. Perversely, and in defiance of wider social trends, it is almost a prerequisite for Australia's captains to be married. Australia's last bachelor captain was Ian Craig - and that was 43 years ago. Take the overblown cliché, that the job of Australian cricket captain comes second only to Australian prime minister, add a pinch of pomposity and you arrive at a modern-day truism: a bachelor running the national team is as unthinkable as a bachelor running the country.

So Ponting's engagement to Rianna Cantor places him squarely in line, for better or worse, to succeed Steve Waugh. It does not, however, make him a sure thing. After all, it was not Shane Warne's smutty brat-chat in a nightclub that pricked Australia's moral conscience and ruled him out of contention; it was the fact that he betrayed his wife and two children.

But there's a bigger issue at stake here. Do married men, preoccupied as much with whether they left the toilet seat up as whether they left their opening bowler on too long, make poor captains? Logic says yes. Steve Waugh, whose 10th wedding anniversary coincided with the Headingley Test, says no. "I think sometimes it can take the pressure off your cricket," he claimed a few years back. "Family with a new baby is great."

Family certainly helped Mark Taylor through his legendary runless streak. "Mark," wife Judi continually reassured him, "you are not a passenger - you are the pilot." And it was family who stood by Greg Chappell when nobody else did after he instructed brother Trevor's underarm delivery - as shown by Greg's post-match conversation with five-year-old son Stephen, repeated in Adrian McGregor's 1985 biography.

"What do you think about it?" Greg asked.

"Um, I don't think you should have done it," said Stephen.

"Well, it's a bit late now, isn't it? How do you feel?"

"I feel sorry for you."

Comfort-blanket factor aside, family can inspire as well as distract. When Richie Benaud's first wife, Marcia, fell ill after giving birth, his frenzied response was to crash a 78-minute century against West Indies. When Warne missed the birth of his first child, Brooke, to play in the 1997 Old Trafford Test it put an extra spring in his stride. "When I received the first pictures of her," he beams in his new autobiography, "I was so pumped up I went out and took 6 for 48."

Marriage can also lend captains maturity, a broader perspective. Bill Woodfull's dignified conduct throughout Bodyline was surely related to the fact that he had a wife and two sons, aged three and one. Would a single-minded single bloke have admonished Plum Warner with Woodfull's "one side is playing cricket" rebuff? Or would he have loaded his team with fast bowlers and fought fire with fire?

By marrying Rianna, who at 21 is five years younger than him, Ponting follows a grand tradition of cradle-snatcher captains. Thanks to the tireless Robinson, we know that Herbie Collins was 51 when he married Marjorie, 24; Warwick Armstrong was 34, Aileen 21; Monty Noble 40, Ellen 24; Billy Murdoch 30, Jemima 21; Ray Lindwall 29, Peggy 17.

Rianna, Ponting explains, "didn't know much about cricket, which was probably a good thing". Maybe, but the jury is still out. Waugh's wife Lynette apparently hated cricket and was peeved when, in the early days of their courtship, Steve wanted to watch a day-night match before they headed out to a party. Yet it was Lynette who told him, after he was carried off at Trent Bridge, to stay on tour rather than help her through the latter stages of her pregnancy.

Ponting, in popping the question over dinner with the Aegean Sea as a backdrop, showed the romance and flight of fancy possessed by the best captains. Even more significantly, perhaps, Rianna is a law student at Wollongong University: just the ticket, surely, to keep the man renowned for his bad-boy shuffle at Sydney's Bourbon and Beefsteak nightclub on the straight and narrow.

Ricky and Rianna: the very, very best of luck.

Chris Ryan is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age. His column appears every Tuesday.

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