Will try hard not to lose wickets: Australia

At the end of Day 4, Phillip Hughes (in pic above) and nightwatchman Nathan Lyon were at the crease.

Mohali - Fighting to save the third Test match at Mohali with their backs to the wall, the visiting Australian cricket team says they will “try as hard” not to lose wickets on Monday, the fifth and final day of play.

At the end of play on the fourth day on Sunday, pacer Peter Siddle told media that the Australian side would take it session by session on Monday.

“The first thing will be to get the 16 runs without losing any wickets…let’s just see how the rest of the session pans out and see how the first hour or so pans out,” he told media persons here.

With the Australians trailing India by 16 runs and having lost three wickets for 75 runs in the second innings, Siddle admitted that it would be hard for the visiting Aussie side to win from here.

“It’s obviously going to be hard to get win from here. It is a matter of still fighting and putting up a good challenge, batting well and seeing where we are later in the day. The first thing is to get past the deficit. Hughes is still out there and he has batted superbly. Hopefully, he can dig in and bat longer and obviously keep fighting,” he said, adding the first thing would be to get past the deficit.

“The situation is that we are still behind with three wickets down. It’s going to be hard, but definitely yes, the first session is going to be big for us tomorrow morning. We will try as hard as we can to score runs and not lose too many wickets,” he said.

Siddle, who got a five-wicket haul on Sunday, admitted that Australia allowed big Indian batting partnerships.

“We have let ourselves down by letting the partnerships get too big on us and put too much pressure back on us. If you take that out of the equation, our bowling unit has been pretty strong. We have built pressure from both ends,” he pointed out.

Australia were bowled out for 408 runs in their first innings Saturday. The Indian side was bowled out for 499 runs Sunday afternoon, with debutant-opener Shikhar Dhawan and opener Murali Vijay scoring 187 and 153 runs respectively.

Australia trails the series 0-2, having lost the first two Test matches in Chennai and Hyderabad.