You can question the flat tracks produced by Australia all you want but the Indian cricket team seriously lacks balance. We have no pie-chuckers, no "batsmen who can bowl a bit". I know you can't produce all-rounders overnight but this is a serious problem.
I also don't understand the bowling performance here. We've seen Australia bowl so differently to India. Aussies had pace, slower ones and bowled wide yorkers or slow bouncers etc at the Indian batsman whereas the Indian bowlers had next to no variations.
The Indian bench strength is piss poor too. Here's the bench in today's game {as per cricbuzz}:
Code:
Manish Pandey, Sanju Samson, Kuldeep Yadav, Shardul Thakur, T Natarajan, Shubman Gill
Swap any current player in the playing 11 with these players and you're not getting any obvious improvement. Knowing Kohli's captaincy, he might bring in Manish Pandey for Mayank Agarwal and have KL Rahul open and bench Saini and bring on Shardul Thakur - but that doesn't fix the balance of the team, IMO.
Kohli's batting hasn't been worthwhile either. He scored 80-odd runs at run a ball, while chasing 390. This would be good if you had someone else going after the bowling at the other end, but for most of his innings, he had Shreyas Iyer, who's another accumulator and can't play an innings like Smith or Maxwell or Labuschagne.
If anything, this series has exposed the weakness in Indian team and there's no real answer here.