KEY POINTS:
You've read the headlines, you've probably seen the evidence yourself. "Australian cricket is in crisis", "the Empire is crumbling", there is, in a cricketing sense, "a new world order".
Well, it's partly true but mostly wishful thinking.
Andrew Symonds' emotional instability that has rendered him `unselectable' to tour
South Africa is probably as apt a metaphor for the Australian team as any at the moment.
Ricky Ponting's enforced rest, you suspect, is more telling than anybody was letting on. After his illogical and continuing defence of wicketkeeper Brad Haddin following the `Neil Broom debacle' there was a sense an under-fire Ponting was headed for a Greg Chappell moment, circa 1981.
That is hypothetical, of course, but you could make a decent case that the obsessive nature of his between-delivery chats with his bowlers towards the end of last Sunday's opening Chappell-Hadlee encounter pointed to a captain that was losing the plot. Good leaders plan for these types of situations but Ponting had either forgotten those plans or did not trust them, or his bowlers ability to carry them out.
Friday night was another bad night at the office for Australia but it was not just the fifth ODI loss in a row that signalled that cricket in the Lucky Country was in a slump.
Where once you only needed to be able to say "strewth, mate" to secure a lucrative Indian Premier league contract, now Australian were being rejected in droves. Brad Haddin, Phil Jaques and Stuart Clark were passed in at auction, as were domestic cricketers Steven Smith, Ashley Noffke, Jon Moss, Bryce McGain, Aiden Blizzard, Michael Klinger, Dominic Thornely, Daniel Harris, Aaron Bird, Michael Dighton, Michael Hill and Brett Geeves. Only Shaun Tait and the little-known George Bailey mustered interest.
New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori was reluctant to explicitly say Australia had lost their "aura", though the implication was there.
"Any team that is losing games will find people questioning them but I still look at the Australian side with a bit of awe. I have played them a lot and lost a lot of games against them.
"But a lot of our younger guys grew up watching the guys who have recently retired [Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath, Matthew Hayden] so when you're playing guys you watched since you were 10 years old, it can be a little bit daunting. But the guys they're playing now, they've played against in A teams and emerging players tournaments. So they have a better understanding [of what's needed to be successful] than if they turned up and were playing guys that have been around for 15 years."
Australia is at a low ebb and, even if they end up retaining the Chappell-Hadlee trophy, that's probably not going to change ahead of a gruelling tour to South Africa. But it is surely a stretch to say Australian cricket, as opposed to the Australian cricket team, is going down the gurgler.
Cricket remains the one true unifying sport across that massive land. It's domestic set-up churns out quality players by the dozen every year. What they haven't done so well in the past five years is to churn out superstars, especially in the bowling department. They are not so easy to produce.
Getting two at one time - one manufactured, one born with genius - in Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne, is unheard of.
Australia will always produce good batsmen. As youngsters they have the benefit of playing on hard and true pitches. They learn to play off the front and back foot and they find few balls they can't score off. Their primary instinct is to attack.
Michael Clarke, Michael Hussey and co have looked to the manor born from the moment they stepped into test cricket and there are high hopes for New South Wales opener Phillip Hughes to have a similar impact.
In fact, you could argue that Australia's domestic scene is so strong that they can pluck a guy from grade cricket, David Warner, and have him succeed immediately on the international stage.
But you cannot do that so easily with bowlers. Shane Warne did not have overwhelming success early, neither did Glenn McGrath. But they were so dedicated to their contrasting crafts that, once they got on a roll, an irrepressible combination of talent and confidence meant they were near impossible to stop.
It was those two who won test after test after test.
"There are broader issues there. They've been overlooked for a long period of time and now we're starting to see the outcomes of those. It's systemic and that's been the case for some period of time but while things were going well people chose to ignore them," former Australian coach John Buchanan told the Daily Telegraph.
Those systemic failures were in talent identification, development and coaching, according to Buchanan.
But the more simplistic arguments that Buchanan rejects appear too powerful to write off completely.
No longer being virtually guaranteed 20 wickets per test has to be a major reason why has the flagship team for such a dominant sporting brand has become so vulnerable. The lack of confidence they now have in test cricket because of that inability to finish sides off has trickled down to one-day cricket.
Hubris, too, has no doubt played a major part. When the most attacking batsmen in the world are backed up by the best seam-spin combination in at least 50 years, you could be forgiven for thinking that the good times are going to last forever. Even when they both retired on the same day, the cold reality hadn't set in.
Perhaps that only really hit when a bowling attack of Mitchell Johnson, Peter Siddle, Jason Krezja and a burnt-out Brett Lee were asked to defend 400-plus at the WACA.
So enjoy this moment while it lasts - with the cheerleaders, sorry commentators, operating at Channel Nine it is impossible not to revel in Australia's sudden decline. Because it won't last forever.
Somewhere in Brisbane or Perth there lurks a 15-year-old Dennis Lillee wannabe. Somewhere in Melbourne and Sydney there's a blond boy trying to rip legspinners down to his mates in the nets.
Even critic Buchanan knows the slump won't last forever.
"I think the real upside here, the real upside for everybody, is that it's a fantastic opportunity for administrators, coaches, players to actually stop and look at what's actually happening, and not just the immediacy of the results," he said.
Perhaps, but it's the immediacy of results that is giving the rest of the cricket world such a boost at the moment.
