The smile said it all.
Ravindra Jadeja, standing with his second successive player of the match award after recording career-best Test figures of 7-42, was asked whether playing the sweep shot was a good way to play him.
He flashed that famous grin and laughed, "not on this kind of wicket," like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
And perhaps it was to everyone except the Australians.
Caught in the middle of the kind of maelstrom of noise and pressure that can only exist in a Test match in India, one-by-one the Australian batters fell playing the same cross-bat shots that India's premier spinner was able to laugh about so knowingly post-match.
What was so jarring was that Australia had been just about in control of an absorbing Test through the first two days of pulsating cricket.
Sure, they had only taken a one-run lead from the first innings — a tightness that in itself was almost unthinkable when India had been reduced to 7-139 in response to Australia's increasingly impressive-looking 263.
Thanks to Jadeja and Axar Patel's stunning 114-run partnership for the eighth wicket, India shifted the momentum in the hosts favour.
The capacity crowd was up, the stadium a cacophony of sound as Usman Khawaja and Travis Head walked out for a 12-over burst before the close of play, a cacophony that only grew when Khawaja was out paddle sweeping for 6.
Yet Head's fearless hitting for 39 at just under a run a ball ensured that the crowd were silenced and Australia were back in the box seat at 1-61 at the close of day two.
Khawaja's dismissal was disappointing, deploying the paddle sweep when leg slip was positioned right there for that exact shot, but not unforgivable.
It's the sort of shot symptomatic of the type of positive batting that is helping England rewrite the record books at the moment, clumsy but easily explained by a need to take the attack to the opposition bowlers.
And attack is all well and good, but shot selection still needs to be front of mind and, with Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin — "the masters of these conditions" according to Rohit Sharma — operating almost unchanged all morning, a degree of sensibility was required.
Instead, where the script for the first two days of the Test had been written as delicately paced psychological thriller, it suddenly turned into a blood-smeared gore-fest that would make even Quentin Tarantino think twice about directing.
In 90 minutes of madness, Australia once again collapsed to be all out in under a session.
The culprit was the sweep. Including Khawaja, six of the ten Australia wickets to fall came from sweep shots.
The world has not been privy to such a macabre tableau of broken sweepers since Mickey Mouse's Sorcerer's Apprentice splintered his broom into a thousand pieces in the 1940 Disney classic Fantasia.
After being comprehensively spooked by the turning track in Nagpur, it seemed as though Australia's batters had it in their heads that sweeping was the only option, the shards of Mickey's broken broom multiplying exponentially until sweeping was the only thing they could think of.
Matt Renshaw only faced eight balls in the second innings and swept at five of them — the fifth seeing him trapped LBW by Ashwin.
In this series, Alex Carey has now been out three times attempting a reverse sweep.
Had the pitch got into the batters heads?
Cavernous cracks were developing, assisting prodigious turn off a length that was enough to tease out Head and Marnus Labuschagne with classic finger spinner deliveries — the second of which also kept very low to bowl Labuschagne.
But when Steve Smith is out sweeping and barely getting close to hitting the ball, a man whose average in India has dropped to a still magnificent 52.21, perhaps it might be time to keep the bat straight.
The damage, 9-48, made it Australia's third worst collapse of nine wickets in the third innings of a Test in history.
From a position of such strength, Australia's weaknesses were brutally exposed.
"It wasn't easy," Cummins told the host broadcaster at the post-match presentation.
"Ashwin and Jadejda were bowling well, but I think that will be the review, shot choice, [we] didn't go about it the right way."
Defending a paltry total of 115 was always going to be a fools errand, no matter how badly the pitch was behaving.
Yet India showed again how to bat in those conditions, using the feet, getting to the pitch of the ball and, crucially, playing with a straight bat.
Australia has ten days to stew on the result and subsequent surrendering of any chance of reclaiming the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.
It also has ten days to reassess its plan on how to play in these final two matches, because up until now the planning has been muddled at best.
Travis Head, left out of the first Test due to his inability to play spin, top-scored in the second innings when batting was at its hardest and is now Australia's fifth-highest scorer on tour, however Pyrrhic an achievement that is after two devastating losses.
Australia has handed debuts to two different finger spinners in as many Tests, parachuting Matt Kuhnemann in ahead of Ashton Agar, whose bowling, we are told, is not where he'd like it to be, despite having been bought in somewhat surprisingly for the SCG Test in January, expressly with a view of playing him in India.
With David Warner's concussion and broken arm adding to the uncertainty created by the absence of Mitch Starc and Cameron Green, the number one Test team in the world is suddenly looking decidedly unsettled.
India's dominance over bilateral contests between the two teams now extends to four-straight retentions of the trophy for the first time ever.
"Being probably ahead of the game for a lot of it, those opportunities don't come along often in India so you've gotta make the most of it," Cummins lamented.
"So yeah, this one hurts a little bit."
Australia will be hoping reinforcements and a clearer approach will alleviate the pain.