Credit: Reuters Photo
Perth: Nothing unites a team like a victory just as loss gives room for needless fissures. Australia perhaps found themselves in the latter situation when pacer Josh Hazlewood suggested the home batters let the home team down following a tremendous job by the pacers in India's first innings on Friday.
While skipper Pat Cummins, himself a pacer, played down Hazlewood's comments, saying all was well within the Aussie change room, gossip mills were busy speculating a potential rift within the hosts' ranks.
After Aussie pacers had shot down India for a modest 150, the home batters let them down by imploding for 102, completely surrendering the advantage.
"Well, you'd probably have to ask one of the batters that question," Hazlewood had said, rather curtly, on Sunday evening when asked about how the team would go about in their chase of the big target. "I'm sort of relaxing and trying to get a bit of physio and a bit of treatment. I'm probably looking mostly towards the next Test and what plans we can do against these batters. I guess the batters just sticking to what they do, their preparation. They'll have a hit in the morning and talk about the plans of what happened in the first innings, how they can negate that and move forward and improve on that."
Cummins, addressing the media after the first Test, backed his batters and insisted Australia was a tight unit.
"I don’t know what Joshy said, but no, not at all," Cummins emphasised while dismissing talk of division in the team. "There’s plenty of times where the batters have dragged us bowlers out of tight situations and we’ve done the same. It’s a really tight unit. It’s probably one of the tightest teams I’ve ever played with. We really enjoyed playing cricket together. We’ve been through a lot the last few years, the core group. So no problems there. Everyone gets along really well. so all good."