Cricket is Life: Ponting's men hesitate and lose: Nielsen

Australia's Test players are too slow to identify and take command of the crucial moments in matches, their coach Tim Nielsen admits. As he mounted a staunch defence of Ricky Ponting's captaincy tenure, Nielsen said a major reason for the team's slide from cricket supremacy to mediocrity was quite simply an inability to recognise or grasp opportunities when they presented themselves.

"We talk about it all the time and we try to do it as a batting group and a bowling group, identify the critical periods and then do our best to win them," said Nielsen. "You can talk about these things as much as you like, people can come in and help, people can make comment and do what they want to do, but in the end it's up to us.

"They have to learn from their experiences, they have to be better at taking the things they've seen and learned and put them into their game so they are better for it, and we have to make sure we're doing those things as fast as we can.

"That's where the pressure is at the moment, because the scoreboard's saying we're not doing it fast enough, the public perception is we're not doing it fast enough, and we need to make sure we've got faith in the way we're going about things."

Nielsen said players both senior and junior had to take responsibility for not standing up when it mattered.

"We keep staying in the contest for as long as we possibly can, and I reckon we're probably an hour away in all those losses from being on the other side of it," he said.

"That's maybe where we need senior players either to stand up for a bit longer, or the young developing players to have a bit more of an impact for longer, to try to keep us in the game for an extra hour, or try to ram home our advantage for an extra hour.

"We talked about in Mohali for example, maybe when Sharma was hurt on day one that might've been the day for us to really ram home the advantage we had, but in saying that, the spinners bowled really well and we found them hard to get away, and the wicket was probably going to deteriorate, so the players were weighing up the risk (against the) reward.

"Sometimes you can't do exactly as you'd like to do, which has an impact later in the game. You see a close result and people say 'oh you couldn't get that last wicket', well it wasn't that, it was four and three quarter days before that leading to it."

Ponting's leadership has faced harsh critiques from the likes of Geoff Lawson and Shane Warne in the wake of the 2-0 series loss to India, but Nielsen was adamant about his qualities.

"We were probably one ball away from a Test match result in Mohali, and I wonder whether all of these things would've been talked about if that had been the case," he said.

"Internally there is in no way shape or form any sort of panic.

"We understand we didn't get the results we'd have liked, but from my and the team's point of view Ricky's got 1000 per cent support and there is nobody better in Australian cricket or anywhere else in the world for the job."