This match may not alter the result of the series, but it can alter the perception that India are not yet ready to challenge for the top spot in world cricket on a consistent basis.With the many advantages India had before the series - availability of all their top stars, familiarity with conditions, vociferous crowd support, and an opponent hit by injuries - they should have been realistically looking at winning the series by a margin of at least 5-2. As things stand now, they are in danger of losing by that margin. The series may be lost, but there is a world of difference between 5-2 and 4-3, and there is the opportunity to show a lot of character by bouncing back from three morale-sapping defeats.India's bane has been their inability to harness their strength effectively and their inability to shore up their weaknesses even a little bit. The Indian batting has always been its strength, and there have been several instances when Indian batsmen have left the spectators gasping with their stroke-play in this series, but not once have they done it together. Because of the abundance of batting talent available, a lack of firing in unison has been papered over to some extent, but the end result has been that when faced with a team that plays as a team, India has come up short. For example, in the heartbreak at Hyderabad, of the six Australian batsmen who batted, none failed, whereas in India's reply, everything relied on one man, with only Suresh Raina providing any sort of support.In the bowling and fielding department, India have alternated between being bad and being embarrassing, with only a few moments of sunlight in between. The bowling has often been short, wide or on the pads - feeding an already strong Australian line-up with freebie runs. However, the fielding has outdone the bowling too, with several sloppy efforts and grassed catches giving the Aussies a deluge of early Christmas presents. The sloppiness is all the more stark when one takes into account the fact that both teams have strong batting line-ups and that therefore the key differentiators in the series are likely to be bowling and fielding. That is exactly what has happened, with each of the close matches being won on the field.Australia are justifiably proud of the way they have overcome what would have been crippling set-backs for any team, to emerge triumphant. Ricky Ponting has reacted in the same way that he did after Australia lost the Ashes in 2005 - he has exhorted his team to go and win everything in sight, and they have done just that. Of their batsmen, none has been more impressive than Michael Hussey. He has yet to fail in the series, and has remained not out on 3 of the 6 occasions he has batted, giving him an incredible 100+ average for the series. To top that, his strike rate has been 97.50 and no Indian bowler has looked like dominating him at any stage. Not too far behind in the running for the biggest thorn in the Indian side has been Shane Watson. After a couple of failures initially he has batted well enough to be amongst the top 5 run-getters in the series, while leading the bowling charts in wickets. Watson, in fact, looks the most likely to bag the man-of-the-series award for his consistently brilliant displays with bat and ball. Even though he will