Ricky Ponting’s Emotional Interview With Mark Howard

A different side to the Punter.


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For Australian captain Ricky Ponting has revealed the story behind the inspiration for the Ricky Ponting Foundation.

The foundation provides a range of services to help young Australians and their families beat cancer.

Ponting revealed to Mark Howard on The Howie Games podcast that a visit Royal Children’s Hospital in Sydney changed his life.

"We got to the chemotherapy ward where there was a 13-year-old boy who’d gone through his daily dose of chemo and was just laying back on his bed, and he’s attached to all these machines and tubes are coming out of him," Punter told Howard.

"I got up close to the glass, he saw me by the window and he sat up in bed and his face lit up. Because he couldn’t come out and I couldn’t go in he wanted to get as close to the window as he could."

"He sat up in bed and put his feet on the ground and basically, as soon as his feet hit the ground, he just vomited all over the place because of the pain he was going through. He threw up everywhere."

"Rianna and I walked out the front together, and we’d kept it together inside, but once we got out the front both of us just started bawling our eyes out at what we’d just seen."

"That was the line in the sand. It was, ‘Right, now we’ve got to help these people'."

Ponting goes onto reveal the health battles his son Fletcher faced in his first six-months.

"When he got to six months of age he had another pretty serious infection that we didn’t know much about and the doctors didn’t know much about," Ponting said.

"That was the scariest one because he was shut down — he was sedated for about four or five days at one stage where he couldn’t open his eyes."

Fighting back tears Punter takes a few moments to compose himself.

"I've never done that before. I’ve spoken about him a lot of times but that’s never happened before."

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE TO RICKY PONTING ON THE HOWIE GAMES

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9 January 2017

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Cricket




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