Tim Paine: Ignore the critics, Australian team just needs to focus on playing good cricket

Has Kohli gone soft? Is he too nice? Has he lost his killer edge?

You didn’t hear any of that sort of chat after the match of course because he made an unbeaten second innings century and India won in a canter.

There was however a fair bit of discussion around Yashasvi Jaiswal’s second-innings quip to Mitchell Starc that the ball was coming on too slowly.

Pretty bold you might have thought from a young player on his first Test tour of Australia?

Perhaps, but he only made the remark once India were well more than 100 runs ahead with 10 second wickets in hand.

There was nothing like that in the first dig when he fell for a duck.

Had the shoe been on the other foot you can only imagine what the conversation would have been like?

The Australians would have been labelled as bullies and as frontunners for getting stuck into their struggling opponents.

I really do feel for this Australian team. Not because they don’t deserve criticism for their first Test performance, much of which has been warranted.

Pick apart their bowling lengths, Marnus Labuschagne’s decision to leave as much as he did, selection or even the team’s preparation.

All these things have a material impact on who wins or loses.

But they have come under fire for the way they’ve otherwise acted on the field and I don’t think it’s all justified.

Having been there at Cape Town more than 6½ years ago and then led the side through the trying public relations battle that ensued, I am all too aware of how the team has been perceived over the years.

Clearly there was a reckoning coming, and under Justin Langer we made a concerted effort to be on our best behaviour.

For the most part we managed to change the reputation of the team. We were generally magnanimous; win lose or draw.

Occasionally I erred, as happened when I called Ravichandran Ashwin a “d***head” at the SCG four summers ago.

I copped it at the time from the public and commentators, and fair enough, too. But we can’t then have it both ways.

To argue that Australia has lost its air of intimidation and needs to get back to its chest-beating and gnarled ways of yesteryear feels like hogwash to me.

The great Australian teams of the 1990s and 2000s may have sledged, but they didn’t win because of it.

They won because they had the most skilled players in the world. Had they not uttered a word on the field they still would have wiped the floor with most opposition teams.

This current Australian outfit is a relatively quiet one. David Warner clearly leaves behind a hole when it comes to energy, although he had not berated opponents for many years.

Marnus is generally up and about but is not really a chirper towards opposition teams. Travis Head talks a bit of trash but it’s never nasty and generally pretty funny.

Nathan Lyon talks relentlessly to some opposition players but does so more with the aim of distraction than denigration.

And yet the nucleus of this side has retained the Ashes twice in England, won the World Test Championship and claimed the one-day World Cup last year in India.

Being a bit subdued didn’t seem to be too much of an issue then did it?

Even the commentary around Josh Hazlewood distancing himself from the side’s batters seemed far-fetched to me.

“Hoff” is a straight-shooting guy, but he’s hardly going out there to create a divide in the team. He just spoke like the No. 11 that he is, and he’s right, it was going to be up to the batters to salvage something from that Test.

It all felt over the top and retrofit. Had he made a similar remark with Australia chasing a total they were likely to run down it would not have been an issue.

Ultimately it is impossible to please everyone. The national side means a lot to a lot of people but it is also used as a proxy to fight culture wars.

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No doubt another loss will get people coming out and complaining about how the team is too woke or whatever that means.

Certain things matter in cricket, but a lot of what is spoken about doesn’t really change who wins and loses.

These guys should keep being themselves, as for most of them it’s proven highly successful over an extended period.