India is a tough place to play: Hussey

Retired Australian batsman Michael Hussey has said that he did not reveal his plans to quit international cricket until the week before the Sydney Test in January because he had feared he would have been dropped earlier from the team had he done so.

"Partly why I didn't want to say anything to anyone was that I cherished every Test match I got to play and I really wanted to finish the Australian summer," he said.

"If I made it known earlier then perhaps they would start looking ahead earlier and not play me in my last couple of Tests.

"That was a small selfish part of it that I really wanted to finish when I wanted to finish. I didn't want them to say 'you're going to retire, we'll blood someone else'," Hussey was quoted as saying by ESPNcricnfo.

"Most of it though was making sure I was 100 per cent sure about the decision. I wanted to make sure in myself, I wanted to see how I felt through the Australian summer, and my feelings certainly didn't change.

"When I started looking ahead to what was coming up I knew I was going to find it really tough," he said.

Hussey said that it will take some time for Australia to build a strong team culture and a settled side because of the "upheaval" Australian cricket has witnessed in the last one year.

"There's been so much change and upheaval in Australian cricket over the last year or so, changing of coaches and selectors, players have come out of the team and new players have come in.

"So you've got to expect it will take time for trust to build up, friendships to build, the hard times, the good times together, it all builds the culture over a period of time," he said.

Talking about Australia's poor show in the Test series in India so far, Hussey said, "India's a tough place to play at the best of times, and if you don't have very good preparation going into it, you're not going to perform well."