For several years the Australian team have struck me as a group of players who were being paid a great deal of money, who had started believing their own press releases, who were surrounded by a court of hangers on who lacked the ability to say anything hard as this might threaten their own places on the gravy train - in short, as a team who were headed for a fall. The West Indian side looked the same way in 1989. Ponting as a captain has been a tactical ignoramus (but people in the cricket media have until recently shied from saying this, as doing so might threaten their places on the gravy train) and has done a poor job of inspiring his team. Ponting was preceded by three great captains in Border, Taylor, and Waugh, and is obviously inferior to any of them as a leader. I had thought that Australia's decline (when it happened) would not be as bad as that of the 1990s West Indies due to better management and attitudes in Australia, but I am now no longer so sure. I was perhaps deluded (in perhaps the same way you were deluded when you believed that this Labour government wouldn't trash the nation's finances in the traditional way) because the symptoms look the same.

Part of the issue is of course that Steve Waugh was the last man in the Australian side to have played in the dreadfully unsuccessful Australian teams of the mid 1980s and who knew how hard it had been to reach the top in the first place. While he was still there, the burning desire not to lose and to try to avenge the humiliations of 1981 to 1985 drove the Australian team. When he was gone, the spirit of the team was gone. (The extent to which all Australia's victories of the last 20 years were ultimately about trying to avenge that horrible day at Headingley in 1981 should not be understated).

Or perhaps I am talking crap and it is in fact all about Shane Warne. Certainly Australia would have just won both of the recent matches with trivial ease if Warne was playing. But there is a lot more to the decline of Australian cricket than that.

I agree that Waugh was a true colossus, but I think you are just a bit harsh on Ponting. Let's not forget that Warne, McGrath, Gilchrist, Gillespie and Langer all departed the scene at pretty much the same time. The latter two were very good test players; Gilchrist was at the very least a remarkable cricketer, while Warne and McGrath were among the finest players ever to have graced the game. How can life after that lot result in anything other than a significant decline in standards? (I maintain, by the way, that England would not have won the Ashes in 2005 had McGrath stayed fit ... but that's another story).