Australia skipper Steve Smith has shed light on the infamous DRS row during his side’s tour of India for a four-match Test series earlier this year.

Opposing counterpart Virat Kohli had fuelled suggestions that the Aussies had indulged in systemic abuse of the DRS with on-field batsmen seeking help from the dressing room before making a decision on whether to review a particular call.

In his book, The Journey, Smith recounted Kohli’s accusations of cheating and rubbished the Indian skipper’s claims.

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“It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised what a talking point it had become, fuelled by Kohli’s post-match claims that we’d called on off-field assistance twice earlier in the match to help our on-field deliberations,” Smith wrote in his book.

The incident Smith was referring to came during the second Test of the series in Bengaluru with the visitors 1-0 up following their unexpected triumph at Pune. Batting in the fourth innings, Smith was adjudged lbw by Nigel Long and had sought the opinion of the non-striker, Peter Handscomb, on whether to review the call.

Handscomb had in turn motioned to the dressing room for an answer and following this, Long had promptly Smith back without the luxury of a review.

“As far as I was concerned, we’d never tried to consult with the dressing room beforehand and although he said he’d brought those previous occasions to the notice of the umpires, I can say categorically that we were never spoken to by either those umpires or match referee Chris Broad about any such breaches in protocol,” Smith adds in his book.

Smith poured cold water over Kohli’s claims and said that he had been surprised that the Indian captain had taken things so far.

“Virat has always been a player who’s thrived in the most intense of environments, and like me he loves a battle and I can only think it was his way of raising the temperature in the series in an attempt to get the best out of himself. The idea of getting messages from the sidelines for that purpose was not a tactic we as a team ever spoke about. I can’t work out what he was referring to in his remarks,” Smith said in another passage from his book.

“There was never anything further on the matter from the ICC and Virat never detailed the incidents he was referring to. And during the brief interactions we had – including at the captain’s briefing for the IPL as that tournament followed the series – he was friendly and it was as if any ill-feeling he may have had over the incident had disappeared. It was and still is all a big mystery to me.”

India had managed to overturn Australia’s win at Pune to claim the series 2-1 in a hard-fought manner.