Sibley may make debut in Ponting's last game

As one of the great batsmen of all time plays his final First Class game, a 17 year old prodigy has a chance of making his debut in the County Championship match against Nottinghamshire this week.

Ricky Ponting first played a First Class game back in 1992, 3 years before Dominic Sibley was born, and after 288 games, with almost 24,000 runs, Punter is bowing out of the game. Sibley, born in 1995, was just 3 months old when Ponting made his test match debut and now has the chance to play with a batsman that he grew up watching.

Here is the squad in full:

Gareth Batty (C)

Arun Harinath

Rory Burns

Vikram Solanki

Ricky Ponting

Zander de Bruyn

Steve Davies

Zafar Ansari

Dominic Sibley

Chris Tremlett

Jade Dernbach

Tim Linley

Gary Keedy

It’s not a certainty that Sibley will get a debut, however, as that rests on the shoulders of whether Rory Burns is fit enough after a hamstring injury he sustained in a second X1 match last week. Burns retired hurt and later wrote in his column for the Surrey Mirror that he had torn his hamstring, but I think if that was the case he would be out for a while, so hopefully he only tweaked it. We obviously need a win in the Championship and we want our best players available for the game, but if Burns wasn’t to make it, then it will be some occasion for Sibley.

The Ashtead CC opener is a graduate of the Pemberton Greenish Academy and doesn’t turn 18 until the 5^th of September, the same birthday as a certain Mark Ramprakash, and has been talked about for a while. I first head of Sibley a couple of years ago when, at 15, he struck a double century in a Surrey Premier Division match against bowlers such as Jimmy Ormond, and since then I have been waiting to see him come into the side. It would be great to see him play tomorrow, but if he doesn’t, the experience for him would be vital for when he eventually does get a go.

What can I say about a man who is 21 years older than Sibley? Ponting will go down as one of the greats and it is a privilege that his last First Class match will be for Surrey at the Oval. He hasn’t had the best of times at our ground, obviously losing the Ashes in both 2005 and 2009 there, but hopefully he will bow out by providing us with one more superb innings. He will carry on to play in the T20 for us and in the Caribbean T20 in August, but this is the format that made Ponting who he is today.

When it comes to the bowlers named in the squad, there is a bit of a selection headache for Stewart and Barnes. 3 seamers plus de Bruyn have been named in the squad and two spinners plus Ansari, so there are plenty of options. Notts’ attack is much reliant on their seamers so I would presume that the groundsman would be told to try and produce a turning wicket, which may mean that Keedy, who took a 7-fer in his last game, will play alongside Batty. Another option is to not play Keedy and have Ansari and Batty as the two spinners and therefore play Trem, Jade and the Viscount. I’m not sure which way they are going to go.

So this is a massive game for us as we still look for our first win of the season. However, we have won 4 in a row in the FLT20 which could only prove beneficial for us when it comes to the Championship, because when you get that winning feeling, you don’t want to give it up easily.