Will go to Perth with real belief: Paine
Australian skipper Tim Paine found the 31-run defeat to India “hard to take” but said they will take inspiration from their fighting fifth-day effort in the opening Test and head to Perth with “real belief ”.
Chasing 323, Australia were bowled out for 291 runs in the second innings. “It won’t be any more difficult than this is. Every Test match is a huge challenge and we’ve expected this series to be an absolute arm-wrestle from the get go,” Paine said at the postmatch press conference.
“If you want to be a good team you have got to be hard to beat and today we were hard to beat, we made India work really hard, I think we made them work harder than they thought they were going to have to work.
“We have picked the same team for the first two Tests and we are going there [Perth] with real belief.” Australia batted more overs than India in this Test, yet ended up on the losing side. Paine said this was an area of improvement for the series ahead. “Sitting back now it is a huge opportunity because we didn’t cash in the first innings and didn’t have batters out there today when they were tiring. Had we taken either of those chances, we would have won this Test match, so it’s pretty hard to take.
“It’s a really key element for us, to get lots of overs into them and I am sure India are thinking the same with us. They want to see our fast bowlers bowl a hell of a lot of overs.”
Paine underlined that they need to get more runs from the top-order going ahead. “The batting conditions in first innings were not easy. It was hard to score. India bowled superbly throughout, built a lot of pressure on us and we couldn’t quite get through those tough periods,” Paine said.
“There were a number of reasons why we lost. I thought we could have cleaned them up on day one for 200-210 and we let that slip a little bit.
“Clearly we would like to score more than 230 in the first innings in Australia and there were other things along the way. We need to tighten up.”