Indians must get on the top of their Sri Lankan nemesis Ajantha Mendis by punishing him for his bad deliveries to bring him under pressure, says Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni.

"It is more about him (Mendis). If he bowls a bad ball then punish him and build up pressure on him. If you continue to defend him then you know he will also be on top," Dhoni said.

"It is very important that whenever he bowled a bad bowl we will get runs out of them so that you know he (Mendis) gets under a bit of pressure," Dhoni said after winning the match by 33 runs to take 2-1 lead in the five-match series.

"I think S Badri(nath)'s effort was great. He took on Mendis. He went for a big shot but that is what you need to do at times to put some pressure on the bowler. Till now he (Mendis) was never under any sort of pressure. So he was bowling at his best," he added.

His match-winning 76-run knock notwithstanding, Dhoni said India won the third one-dayer yesterday because of a team effort with no body having a bad day and would prefer it this way in the coming matches as well.

"It is better to have a contributory effort while winning a match but we are not relying on one individual," he said.

"If you will have the privilege of getting individual performances like Zaheer played well in the last match. In this match also he has bowled well. But it is always better to win in the sense when it is a team effort and every one enjoys. No body had a bad day. It is good overall if we can continue to do this way," he added.

But Dhoni admitted India should have scored more runs especially with seven batsmen.

"When you are playing with a extra batsman, you need to score over 250 runs to put pressure on the opposition team. Especially in these conditions, when the wickets are slow, your part timers will have an effect. Still we do not have partners like Virender Sehwag or Sachin Tendulkar who can turn the bowl and are quite consistent with their bowling.

"So we have to see which bowler is bowling well on a particular day and use him. Hopefully we will not have a day when all (our part time bowlers) of them bowl badly and then there is pressure on the skipper," he said.

"On these sort of wickets, we need to click, especially the top order batsmen one out of the three or four (batmen) has to carry the innings and others can rotate around him. Then only we can achieve big scores in games like this.

Asked if India should have scored 260-270 after seeing the way Mahela Jayawardene and Thilan Tushara batted, Dhoni said, "Well that was the thought. But nothing could be done about it when we could score only 237 runs.

"There was a bit of worry (for us) in the middle because we had to use the 5th bowler which was a part time bowler. (But) Yuvraj (Singh) bowled well. He was turning the ball and that really worked for us.

"Of course as we saw in this game that if you have a partnership going and then it becomes very difficult to contain the batsmen. The outfields are fast.

"The ball comes on. Even if turns later you can go after the fast bowlers and the spinners. So it is very important to have partnership in the middle and save wickets for the death over."