Ponting happy with team security arrangements

Australia's cricket team is "totally confident" in security measures taken in response to reports of a terror threat against the squad during last year's Ashes series, according to the captain Ricky Ponting. The Sunday Times reported Al-Qaeda plotted to murder the entire Australian team in their changing rooms during the Edgbaston Test in Birmingham, using sarin nerve gas sprayed by the men who bombed the London Underground.

"We are totally confident in the security precautions Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association take on our behalf," Ponting said in a statement released in India, where the team is about to play in the Champions Trophy tournament.

"With regards to this report, we were very comfortable with the security arrangements that were in place during the recent Ashes tour and we continue to trust the security information provided to us by Cricket Australia and the ACA."

However, Ponting had raised the players' concerns over security in the immediate aftermath of the London bombings. "I know quite a few players feel there is an element of inconsistency about our decision to continue with the tour and I agree with that," Ponting wrote in his Ashes Tour diary. "If we were in, say, Pakistan or Sri Lanka and something like this had happened, I am sure we would have been on the first plane out.

"Countries like that have lost revenue as a result of tours being called off because of terrorist threats yet here we are, staying put in the United Kingdom after terrorists just didn't threaten to do something, but in fact detonated explosives in the city where we are due to play our next two matches.

"I bet the officials of those countries are wondering where the consistency is in the current situation. The players want guarantees the level of security at playing venues will be stepped up because we have not been happy with what we have seen so far."

James Sutherland, the Cricket Australia chief executive, said the board had no knowledge of the terrorist threat during the Ashes tour. "At no stage then or since was there any specific issue relating to the Australian or England teams raised with us," he said. "We work with the Australian Cricketers' Association to take expert security advice from as many sources as we can before we make decisions about whether tours should go ahead or not."

Peter Young, a Cricket Australia spokesman, said the London Metropolitan Police, who the board worked with to ensure proper security of the players, had not mentioned a threat as part of their security advice. "We have had a heightened concern for security for a number of years and that's been evident by our actions on a number of occasions when we have cancelled tours where we have not been 100 percent convinced that safety and security was as appropriate as it could be," Young told The Courier Mail.

"Unfortunately it is part and parcel of modern life when you are travelling the globe. We didn't go to Sri Lanka or Pakistan because we were not 100 percent sure. Being 99 percent sure isn't good enough."