After Perth high, inconsistency in batting comes back to bite India

The heavy defeat on Sunday has again exposed a batting line-up that dominates but can also slump without a fight

- Agencies

ADELAIDE: In three of the four innings India have completed on this tour of Australia, the top-scorer has been Nitish Reddy. That shouldn't be right, but it is.

In their last 10 innings, India have scored less than 200 six times with a low of 46. That shouldn't be right, but it is.

Since the home series against New Zealand in 2021, India's top seven have been averaging 27.94 in SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) countries. That shouldn't be right, but it is.

Yet, Rohit Sharma isn't worried about the batting. That shouldn't be right, but it is.

"I wouldn't say worry," said the India captain on Sunday when he was asked about the downturn in India's batting form. "I mean, if you take the last five or six Test matches, of course, we didn't bat well enough. We accept that. And we agree, when we play in India, we are trying to play on very difficult conditions.

"And that is what we wanted. It's not by anyone else's choice. It was our choice. And we knew that the big scoring or the highest or high-scoring games are not going to happen and that is something that has been the case over the last four or five years and we accept that. But whenever we travel abroad you know the conditions are there to score runs, we have scored runs as well... like you saw in the first game we got a lot of runs."

The troubling question then is whether India's batters are only good to score runs in favourable conditions. When the going gets tough, can India's batters step up for their team? The collapse is becoming a familiar taste of defeat.