He battled his way out of a dead-end town, but alcohol and gambling almost destroyed him. Now Ricky Ponting is the world's best batsman. His next challenge: to regain the Ashes

The Bourbon & Beefsteak Bar, in Sydney's red light district, never closed. For a start, it had no doors. Opened in 1968 to attract American GIs on leave from Vietnam, it was the city's nocturnal destination of last resort, as popular with pimps and crooks as with tourists and office workers out on the town. One Sunday night in January 1999, Ricky Ponting dropped in at the Bourbon after another poor performance against England in a one-day international. He was 24 and in his third year in - and often out - of the Australia team (he had been dropped and reinstated four times). His confidence was fragile after a wretched season. He was gambling more than he should and drinking too much. There was a feeling that he had risen too fast and that the team management could not keep protecting him from his worst excesses.

That Sunday night Ponting had been drinking with team-mates when he met a young, dark-haired woman. She was not Kellie Sainty, his long-term girlfriend from Tasmania. Together they went to the Bourbon where, later, Ponting tried to hit the dance floor with Carlotta, a famous drag queen. The details of what happened next may have remained hazy were it not for the presence of an off-duty photographer from Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper, Julian Andrews, whose photographs of Ponting stumbling out of the Bourbon with one-and-a-half black eyes were published later that week. It emerged that Ponting had been punched by a bouncer following an altercation. Carlotta said the cricketer had taken exception to a barman refusing him a drink. As he left the bar, supported by his 'mystery date', Ponting looked every bit our Tasmanian George Best. The most talented young batsman in Australia seemed set on self-destruction.