I am the main culprit, I blame myself for the defeat, says Dhoni

Perth: Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni on Sunday took the blame on himself for a disastrous performance of his team against Australia, saying that he was the main culprit as the captain.

"I need to blame myself as I am the leader of this side. Of course, I am the main culprit, so of course I blame myself," Dhoni said at the post-match press conference here. Dhoni also defended the seniors batsmen who have come under sharp criticism for consistently failing in Australia as well as preceding series in England. Asked whether the seniors should be phased out, Dhoni said that should come up only after the end of the series. "We will have to see what is the thought of the seniors. It has to be a very careful decision that needs to be taken. They have the experience and they can share it with the youngsters," he said. The 30-year-old skipper said the main reason behind India's flop-show has been there failure to score enough runs consistently. "I can only talk about the game so far and if you see the games that we had played in England, the Test natches here, it is only the one reason -- we have not put enough runs on the board, something that we need to be careful about because we want to give the bowlers that amount of runs to get the opposition out," he said. "One or two bad innings, it can happen in Test cricket, but overall, the seven test matches, this is a bit too long for the batting line up to flop," Dhoni added. Dhoni said it was one of the worst phase for Indian cricket and blamed the batsmen for failing them. "The amount of cricket that I have seen, this is definitely one of the worst phase where we have not done consistently well. We have not put runs on the board. Bowling, I think because of injuries, we suffered a set back, over here, we have not been as consistent," he said. "Overall, I don't think bowling is a real worry, we have not been consistently batting well, our line-up flopping consistently." PTI