Kohli’s desire to win is conspicuous to be often mistaken for a form of madness. His teammates cannot live up to either the performance or the intensity, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to win as much as he does. There is, nonetheless, an anxiety within the Indian public that Australians would recognise: a belief that the players live in a gilded bubble; that, as members of the Twenty20 generation, they lack the sense of history that should drive them beyond normal limits to be the first Indian team to win a Test series in Australia; that their will has been softened by the easy riches flowing out of the Indian Premier League; that they fail to see themselves as custodians of a cap that represents a whole country. Such criticisms come out of defeat and are used to explain it, regardless of accuracy. It’s often more a statement of what the public has decided to believe.

The Australians, by contrast, post-purge, have a simple and unifying motivation: they don’t want to be the first team to lose to India in Australia, and they have a great desire to show that they can win without Steve Smith and David Warner. In an oblique way, the absence of those two plus Cameron Bancroft has done the remaining players a favour.

With the series arriving in Melbourne at one-all, this is the time for the Indians to show if they are an authentic world No.1 team or not. To be a true champion cricket team, they must win away from home. You would think that is motivation enough.

One thing The Hindu got absolutely right is that the current series has been so enthralling that it deserves not to be fuzzed over by peripheral matters. Are sections of the Australian media trying to get under Indian skins? Only if it helps attract eyeballs, but there is no need for a conspiracy, and nor are Australians well-organised enough to orchestrate one. Far from being ‘selectively leaked’, the Sharma-Jadeja footage was belatedly found and then broadcast universally. In fact, the ‘embedded correspondent’ sitting next to me saw it happen live as it went on, all 90 seconds of it, thought nothing of it, and went on dreaming up rhapsodies about Kohli’s earlier century.

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What all sides can agree on is that some wonderful cricket gets too easily overshadowed by the easier-to-understand soap opera elements. I thought Kohli’s first-innings century in Perth was so good, in the circumstances and on that wicket, that if he’d gone on for another hour and made it a match-winner, it would have been knocking on the door of the small cubicle reserved for the best three innings I have ever had the privilege to see in the flesh (for the record, Brian Lara Bridgetown 1999, Brian Lara Kingston 1999, and Mark Waugh Port Elizabeth 1997). But in a twinkling, the world had forgotten the dazzling skill of Kohli’s batting and was talking about the video reviews of his dismissal and then his facial expressions in the field.

Such is the world. But the underlying drama carries more power and lasts longer than the evanescent video skirmishes. We have seen 10 days of cricket in which neither team has remained on top for more than an hour at a time. It is a more even, fluctuating, unpredictable cricket contest than has been seen in Australia for many years. With a series to be won in Melbourne and Sydney, the temperature can scarcely fail to rise further. The tightness of the cricket is the best indicator of how motivated both of these teams are. We are about to find out who really does have the greater need.