(MALCOLM KNOX, the former chief cricket writer at the Sydney Morning Herald, has written a new cricket book The Captains, to be published this month by HardieGrant.)

Steve Waugh used to say that the toss, in cricket, was overrated, and he might have said the same (though he wouldn't, of course) about many other responsibilities and decisions of Test captaincy.

The questioning of Ricky Ponting's suitability to lead Australia into the Ashes series is healthy and inevitable given that his team is misfiring. Actually, it should have happened earlier. Their play in their 0-2 loss in India was far more meritorious than in their easy victories over West Indies and Pakistan at home last summer. That was the time for the real Ashes preparation to take place, when some diabolically poor opposition offered the perfect opportunity to blood new players. But it was missed, and now that Ponting's team is running into good opponents, India and England, the crisis seems to be upon us.

It is Ponting's team, no doubt about that. By the end of this summer, he will either be credited as the genius who regained the Ashes or the dunce who lost them for a third time. In Australian cricket, credit and blame gravitate to one place.

As a captain, Ponting has his shortcomings. The field placements for Nathan Hauritz in Bangalore were as ill-chosen as the decision not to bowl Hauritz in the closing stages in Mohali. By encouraging the off-spinner to bowl less like himself and more like Harbhajan Singh, Ponting undermined Hauritz's confidence.

The Bangalore fields, which Shane Warne criticised via Twitter, were Hauritz's own. This was Ponting's defence, and it's a poor one. A captain is not his bowler's servant. To point the finger at Hauritz, as Ponting did, only condemns the captain. If they're bad fields, they're bad fields, and the captain bears responsibility either for setting them or allowing the bowler to set them.

Hauritz has been something of a bellwether for Ponting's captaincy. Post-Warne, it was always going to be a struggle to win Tests against good batting teams. Yet for a couple of years, Hauritz rose above his limitations. Never a matchwinner, he still managed to play his part. He's no worse a bowler than Graeme Swann. But at critical times - in England in 2009 and in India in 2010 - Ponting has inadvertently pulled the rug out from under Hauritz's feet, losing faith in the bowler and arguably costing Australia the two series.

More astute commentators than I, and ex-captains such as Warne, Geoff Lawson and Ian Chappell, have had much to say about Ponting's limited tactical acumen. I'm prepared to take their word for it. He doesn't have the instincts of a Chappell or a Mark Taylor. But he doesn't have their bowlers either.

If a captain's only as good as his bowlers, he's also only as entitled to the job as the quality of his possible replacements. Allan Border was a great Australian captain, not for any particular skills in managing his men or outwitting opponents, but because he was a talisman in a time of crisis. Even when Border didn't really want the job, in the 1984-86 period, there was no viable replacement. There was talk of elevating Dirk Wellham or Lawson, accomplished state captains and better tacticians than Border, but sometimes a champion's standing in the game supersedes all other qualities.

This is what's known as the ‘Australian way' of picking a Test captain. Choose your team, and if your best batsman has any leadership qualities at all, make him captain. Other countries have traditions of picking a ‘specialist captain'. In Australia, this was a short-lived experiment. In the 1880s, when the acknowledged leader and champion Billy Murdoch went into exile after a quarrel between players and administrators, a couple of ‘specialist captains' were tried. Hugh Massie, who would become head of the Commercial Banking Company, couldn't hold his place in the team. Henry Scott, an establishment doctor, led a tour disastrously to England. From the time of Joe Darling, who led the sides of the Golden Age, through Warwick Armstrong and Bill Woodfull to Don Bradman, it was settled that the Australian way was to lead from the front. The Australian captaincies that did not last long, or had less than successful records, since the Second World War - Ian Johnson, Ian Craig, Graham Yallop, Kim Hughes - shared one characteristic. The man at the top lost, or never had, the ability to lift his team with his own achievements. Strip it back to its essence and the primal quality of the Australian Test captaincy is scoring runs or taking wickets.

It's for this reason alone that Ponting remains the proper Australian captain. It's a default reason, and no great commendation of his skills as a tactician, but it is a mandate built on 133 years of Test cricket. Victoria's Cameron White may well be a better thinker and man manager, but could not carry a Test team on his shoulders. Michael Clarke needs a 500-run Ashes series to show that he could. Ponting is the only batsman who really has the power to do that for the Australian team. And he will have to. Otherwise it's his head on the block.