It was a poor day for us: Nielsen

Mohali, Oct 20 (UNI) Admitting that his team had a poor day in the field, Australian coach Tim Nielsen today said ''We just need to be careful we're not pointing the finger too much, at the moment we just haven't had a great game.'' Talking to mediapersons after the day's play Nielsen said ''We've had a poor day today and this game isn't necessarily lost either... I think when you tend to have a day that's not as successful as you'd like people start looking for reasons or making up reasons and we had a couple of blokes who just got bowled out.'' ''We're aware we've been behind the eight ball for much of this game, we're working hard to get through this game and then after that we'll have some time to sit back and have a bit of a think about what we're doing and how we can do it better,'' he added.

''There's a fair bit of water to go under the bridge tomorrow,'' Tim continued. ''There are a couple of batsmen who've played well for the last hour and a half, if they can get a start tomorrow India will need to bowl very well.'' Asked about the defensive adopted by the Australians, the coach justified, by saying ''I think if we had d had more people in the ring they'd probably have scored at over nine runs an over, maybe 10, we've seen so many bounadries hit on this ground, the outfield is so quick, if the ball only goes two or three metres to one side of the fielder its very difficutl to stop.'' ''Even today under pressure we were scoring at better than three runs an over for the innings, so we realised we needed to stretch out their innings for as long as we could, we needed to slow them down and take a little wind out of their sales, hence Mike Hussey, Cameron White and Michael Clarke bowling. We had to take stock and look at what was best for us in the short term,'' he said.

The coach had a word of praise for young fast bowler Ishant, saying ''Sharma bowled very well to get Ponting,'' and added ''We had them under pressure initially and unfortuantely Matthew couldn't quite get outside the line from a sweep shot and to lose two wickets in an over really took the wind out of our sails, so it's not so much plan A, B or C, we played quite well under similar plans in Bangalore.'' UNI HSB CS HT1930