Saturday was one of the worst days in the history of Indian cricket as Virat Kohli and team which was riding high on confidence after being unbeaten for almost 14 months in this formats now, was handed over a crushing defeat of 333 runs by a pumped up young Australian side led by and industrious Steven Smith. Team India was completely outplayed by the visitors who trapped them in their own spin web. Steve O’Keefe and Nathan Lyon shared all the ten wickets amongst themselves in the 2nd innings shattering the confidence of Indian batsmen.

A lot has been said about India’s performance already as they registered embarrassing scores of 105 and 107 in both the innings. It was only a couple of months ago that the Indian team registered its highest score in Test cricket in the final Test against England and in this game, only two Indian batsmen, KL Rahul and Cheteshwar Pujara managed to score more than 20 runs in both the innings combined.

When the crowd decided not to return the ball:

As Virat Kohli said it in his post match conference, “It was our worst batting display in the last two years. We were not good enough on any of the three days. It was the case of us not applying ourselves too well. We need to see what we did wrong.” However, what he needs to understand is that there is no need to panic. India may have lost the match by a huge margin but there were many factors responsible for it.

Watch our analysis of the match:

To begin with, it was a ridiculous pitch for a Test match that started breaking from the first day itself. Even Australia managed to crawl past 250 in both the innings and had Indian fielders not dropped thatmany catches, things could have been different.

Indian went into match with with five specialist bowlers which was not at all required. Ishant Sharma bowled just 14 overs in the match and failed to pick a single wicket. Jayant Yadav too bowled just 10 overs in the second innings which was very less than what Ashwin (33) and Jadeja (28) bowled. Instead Kohli could have played an extra batsman in Karun Nair on a pitch that was difficult to bat on.

So many lives given to the Australian captain:

Another huge mistake India made was with their usage of DRS. In the Australia’s second innings, India had used both their DRS in the first 40 overs itself and always found themselves on the backfoot. Yet, when they came out to bat, both the openers used the DRS in the first 6 overs itself. This is an area that needs some serious discussion from the team management.

There are still three matches left in the series and with the last game to be played in Dharamshala that favours fast-bowlers, Australia has a real chance of winning first Test series in India since 2004. However, Virat Kohli won’t go down so easy and this victory for the Aussies might have marked the beginning of an exciting competition.