It took me a long time to warm up to Ricky Ponting as a cricketer. I always admired his batting and the supreme ability he had to be ruthlessly dominating. Of his contemporaries/competitors for best batsmen of the modern era he always looked the most dismissive of bowlers when at his best. Lara was aesthetically pleasing, Kallis and Dravid defied bowlers to remove them from the pitch, and Tendulkar looked supremely confident. But no one played with as much seeming arrogance as the boy from Launceston. And maybe it was this typical Australian arrogance and snarling attitude that made me dislike him initially. Apart from the fact that he spit into his palms too often (or maybe the camera just liked focusing on him when he did that). Or maybe it was that he seemed to reserve his best so often for India (though thankfully not in India itself). His three highest Test innings (and three of his six double hundreds) were made against India and it was his pulverizing innings in the 2003 World