It was somewhere around December 2008 that there was a gradual realization within sections of the Australian media that their national Test side was on the wane, that an empire had crumbled - an empire that in its heyday rewrote the rules by which Test cricket was, and still is, played; an empire whose core values of aggression and intimidation as the template for Test success have been adopted by most Test-playing nations today.

India's part in the story of that decline is well known and extensively documented. And then there was Graeme Smith and his men, who outthought and outperformed their traditional nemesis and exposed Australia's post-2006 transition plans as a pipe dream, and thus helped push Australian cricket into an acute identity crisis, which was exacerbated by Andrew Strauss and his England side which regained the Ashes in the most convincing fashion later in 2009.

Add to this the more recent whitewash of Ricky Ponting and his men at India's hands in a truncated Test