Captain Ricky Ponting has dismissed talks of Australia being underprepared for the World Twenty20 Championships by missing the Indian Premier League (IPL) and said his side is instead "in the best shape" following the break before the big event.
Ponting along with Michael Clarke and Mike Hussey, deliberately skipped IPL preferring rest ahead of a busy summer for them while players like Andrew Flintoff got injured and have been ruled out of the World Cup. The fitness of Kevin Pietersen is also under the scanner.
"I don't really know the full extent of their injuries and how much cricket they had actually played leading into the IPL. I was only worried about the players in my side and what our workloads had been like," Ponting said.
"With the amount of big tournaments we have coming up it was about making sure we were in the best shape," he was quoted as saying by The Independent.
"There was obviously great incentive with the amount of money that they both [Flintoff, Kevin Pietersen] went for. For us it was a great opportunity to step away from cricket for a few weeks and make sure we were in the best shape we could be in," he added.
Ponting said if at all Flintoff plays in the Ashes and if his is not 100 per cent fit he will not be able to leave any impact.
"That's the big decision the England selectors will have to make before the first Test. Flintoff is obviously very important to their set up but as we saw in 2007, if he is not 100 per cent fit then maybe the sort of impact he can make is not there," he said.
"I don't know where Pietersen is at either, I don't know how bad his Achilles problem is, they could face something similar there as well," he said.
