MUMBAI: India and Australia go into the second Test at Mohali with the first at Bangalore drawn but with the battle of one-upmanship very much alive, as if that, and not good cricket, is going to bring an ultimate victory.

One had believed that the heartburns of the Sydney Test, at the start of the year, the ugly Symonds-Harbhajan showdown et al, had been left behind and, perhaps forgotten with the passage of time, But no, just one indecisive match, and the old acrimony has been revived. And, as if the rival players haven’t had enough of their say, the media has added fuel to fire.

While Harbhajan, in the center of several controversies in the past few months, was highly chastened and docile as a cow, his long tail-end partnership with Zaheer Khan, appeared to bug Aussie wicket-keeper Brad Haddin.

A hot exchange of words only made Khan more aggressive with the bat. He ended up India’s highest scorer and with the man- of-the-match award.

The same Zaheer Khan hit out at the Aussies after the match, saying that the pressure was now on them, as their attack looked thin indeed. Skipper Ponting reacted strongly by saying that bad weather had come to India’s rescue. “We were definitely the better team.”

The Australian media blamed everyone and everything for Australia’s inability to win the match. They blamed the umpires for unnecessarily stopping play for bad light and rain. One of them said “like performance-enhancing drugs, light-meters too must be banned.” What logic is there in this statement, one fails to understand.

Most in the Aussie media accused Ganguly for time-wasting. As a batsman, how much time can you waste, even if you want to? It is always the fielding side that can be held guilty of delaying tactics by their deliberate acts of taking long over field-setting.

Surprisingly enough. the Australian media overlooked one important factor. It was the poor scoring rate of the visitors. When they had the best of the wicket, Australia scored runs at less than three an over.

Even in the second innings, when they needed to score quickly for a declaration, their total rate was much slower than that of India, who were pushed to saving the match. The fault at your own doorstep is hardly visible.

It does not help the media’s credibility, nor the team whose cause they support, by looking for excuses where there are none.