It used to be the case that Australia struggled chasing small totals; now they struggle defending large ones. Their inability to stop New Zealand reaching 337 yesterday means that the three highest run-chases in one-day history have all come against Australia in the past 15 months.

Here is a list of sides who peaked too soon: the All Blacks before every rugby World Cup since 1987, the India cricket team in 2002, Argentina before last year’s football World Cup finals, the Labour Party in 1991. Could Australia’s cricketers, who won the ICC Champions Trophy 3½ months ago, also be losing form at the wrong time?

It has been a decade since Australia last lost four one-day internationals in a row, taking in a 3-0 loss to England in the 1997 Texaco Trophy. Since then, they have won 192 matches out of 269. Yet Australia had a similarly horrid run-in to the World Cup in 1999, losing three and tying one of their seven matches against West Indies a month before losing two of their first three World Cup matches. They won the final with ease.

In 2003, Australia’s run to the title formed the middle of a 21-match winning streak that shattered the record of 11 wins. It should be remembered that Australia, with five first-choice players missing from the side now in New Zealand, won ten matches in a row before first losing to England 17 days ago.

When, or if, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Brett Lee, Michael Clarke and Andrew Symonds return, the team will be more daunting, although the bowling resources seem thin.

Their media is concerned, not hysterical. “Australians are brutally exposed” said The Age, in Melbourne. “Defeat sours Aussie Cup hopes” claimed the Herald Sun. The Daily Telegraph takes the upbeat comments of Mike Hussey, the stand-in captain, to show that the British media was perhaps only premature in dubbing Australia “Dad’s Army” last autumn. “Don’t panic (but it’s hard not to)” is their headline.

Despite all that, the defeat in Auckland was overshadowed on Channel 9’s news bulletin by a report on a Twenty20 charity match in aid of Shane Warne’s children’s foundation. Calm or complacent?

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