We made India work hard for the win: Tim Paine

Australian skipper Tim Paine reckoned that his side made India work hard and push the limits for the 31-run victory that came the way of the visitors on Monday.

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. 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,” said Paine, at the post-match press conference.

“We have picked the same team for the first two Tests and we are going there (Perth) with real belief,” added Paine.

He reflected upon what went wrong for the hosts in Adelaide as he said, ” Sitting back now it is a huge opportunity because we didn’t cash in 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.”

The Australian skipper Paine also laid importance on the contribution made by the top-order.

“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. 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.

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“If we can get through tougher conditions at the start we want our top six batting. This Test we haven’t been able to get a set batter right through or a number of batters right through. I don’t think many people thought we’d get as close as we did today. They didn’t think we’d win but we have a lot of faith particularly in our lower order. We bat pretty deep and Nathan Lyon is getting better all the time,” he opined.

The 34-year old had words of praise for Shaun Marsh. “We all know how good he is. He just keeps coming back and turning up, battling as hard as he possibly can and that can be really hard to do when you are always under the pump. It just shows how strong a character he is and how good a player he is. He’s been in great form the last month or so and I think he is really close to cracking a really big score and winning us some games.”