Give a few thoughts:
- The problem of our batsmen being unable to rotate the strike, which was very apparent during the one-day series, affects our test team as well now. We simply were unable to nudge the ball into a gap or drop it and run or anything like that. Instead, we prefer to to drill it straight the the fieldsmen as if we are only allowed to score in boundaries, and when they couldn't do that, they could only dead-bat it.
- Similarly, India were able to do so, and I think that throughout the series, the Australian fieldsmen were generally too far from the bat to be effective in saving singles. It seems to be a constant problem; e.g. our slips often stand too far back on slow pitches, I guess because our bowlers are sooooooo fast that they need to have the slips that far away. However, fielders in front of the bat were also similarly too far away.
- I thought that our bowling efforts looked listless and lifeless. Even in Perth, I thought India's bowling (perhaps apart from Yadav) looked better than ours for the following reasons. We usually seemed to have no plans to bowl to the Indian batsmen, whether by blocking scoring shots or in exploiting vulnerable strokes. And when we did try something—bowling short in Sydney—we apparently (having no seen that day myself) overdid it, as if we had nothing to fall back upon when that plan didn't work.
Our strategy seemed to be 'bowl good', and a lot of the time, our bowlers looked as if they were simply going through the motions without interest or thought or effort.
- To continue the last point, no-one in our team seemed to be paying any attention to or thinking about ways of countering the Indian batsmen. This might go hand-in-hand with the lack of application in our batting. No-one seemed to be applying themselves mentally and everyone looked uninspired.
