Delhi Capitals head coach Ricky Ponting threw some light on opening batsman Prithvi Shaw's struggles in the last IPL season, revealing that when Shaw had been going through a lean patch he refused to bat in the nets. Shaw's peculiar approach of batting in the nets only when he was scoring in games had Ponting perplexed, and the former Australia captain hoped that his Indian understudy would have changed his approach coming into this season. Shaw averaged just 17.53 from 13 games last season but comes into the IPL on the back of a record-breaking run in Vijay Hazare Trophy.
"I've had some really interesting chats with him through last year's IPL, just trying to break him down, trying to find out exactly what was the right way to coach him and how I was going to get the best out of him," Ponting told cricket.com.au.
"But he had an interesting theory on his batting last year - when he's not scoring runs, he won't bat, and when he is scoring runs, he wants to keep batting all the time.
"He had four or five games where he made under 10 and I'm telling him, 'We have to go to the nets and work out (what's wrong)', and he looked me in the eye and said, 'No, I'm not batting today'. I couldn't really work that out."
Shaw was dropped during DC's run in IPL 2020 and played just one of the three playoff games in a season where the team finished runners-up to Mumbai Indians.
Ponting hoped that Shaw has changed in the five months that have passed between the last IPL and the upcoming season.
"He might have changed. I know he's done a lot of work over the last few months, that theory that he had might have changed, and hopefully it has, because if we can get the best out of him, he could be a superstar player."
Shaw's form has definitely changed for the better in the time between the two IPL seasons.
After being dropped during the Australia Test series, the 21-year-old scored 827 runs from eight matches. for Mumbai in the Vijay Hazare Trophy - the most by any batsman in any season of the tournament.