As Australia began the daunting task of winning in Nagpur to avoid a first Test series defeat since 2005, their constituents observed sceptically from afar. This is a profoundly unpopular cricketing watershed for a country that feels entitled to its champion status. Not for 20 years have I known the Australian public so down on their finest sporting product.

Summer had come to Sydney yesterday, but blue skies and soaring temperatures were evidently no incentive to watch live cricket. New South Wales against Victoria is the most traditional of Australian fixtures, but the audience at the Sydney Cricket Ground was so sparse that the chirping of birds drowned out the desultory speculations of the diehards.

In the stately Ladies’ Stand, which belies its name these days, three dozen had paid the meagre A$7 (about £3) entry charge, including one man in a green Australia shirt with “Ponting” on its back. It was an isolated show of loyalty to the national captain, who is widely being accused of a negativity that was, for years, utterly alien to Australia as they joyfully turbocharged the time-honoured rhythms of the five-day game.

Now, under the increasingly grimacing Ricky Ponting and certainly in the challenging environs of India, they seem prematurely inclined to containment and survival, to safety-first batting and to sweepers rather than slips. It grates with the folks back home and their discontent is not confined to the captain. There is mutinous talk of a team in decline, ageing batsmen, a popgun attack and, most specifically, a spin-bowling void that had for years seemed unimaginable.

The mood of foreboding has invited the contribution of satire. In The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, a columnist named John Huxley began his piece: “It must be some measure of the catastrophic decline in Australian cricket that there are blokes in the squad these days who have not even published an autobiography, let alone a barbecue cookbook.”

Deeper concerns extend to Brett Lee, who took a month-long sabbatical in August to deal with the break-up of his marriage — missing the three-match one-day series with Bangladesh in Darwin — and has not looked the same bowler since, and to Matthew Hayden, who is 37 and a waning force at the top of the order. The banishment of Andrew Symonds for going fishing and missing a team meeting in Darwin is a regular source of public angst and the country seems split on whether the all-rounder should return.

But many feel that the team can get by without any or all of these. Shane Warne is a different matter. It is not only the absence of the man himself that is mourned but the non-appearance of the promised generation of Warne wannabes. Where are all the young wrist spinners with surfer haircuts that seemed certain to queue to replace their hero? The leg-spinning revolution was a romantic notion and should have been a fitting legacy, but it has withered on the vine.

Instead, since Stuart MacGill followed Warne into retirement in June, Australia have experimented vainly with a succession and variety of spinners. Two of them, Beau Casson and Nathan Hauritz, bowled undistinguished spells for New South Wales yesterday, while a third, Jason Krejza, was given a Test debut in Nagpur and responded with two wickets before lunch on the type of dry, dusting pitch that India might have thought twice about producing with Warne in the opposition.

Almost two years have passed since Warne’s tumultuous farewell. There can be no going back, can there? Yet the possibility lingers, nourished by public demand and not exactly extinguished by the man himself. His column in this paper yesterday was characteristic, reiterating that he was retired “at this stage” and adding the catch-all caveat “never say never”.

It is because he is occasionally so equivocal, because he conducts his public orchestra with such wistful charm, that at least one Australian newspaper has banned its writers from offering any further Warne comeback stories — until or unless it happens.

The odds remain against it. He is a busy man, after all. Busy and almost 40, albeit looking fitter than for years. The Warne industry is such that full-time cricket is almost unfeasible. Next month, for instance, Shane Warne The Musical opens at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne.

Warne, who is being played by the aptly named Eddie Perfect, will doubtless be required on the red carpet.

Then there is his poker hobby, not to mention his starring role in the new National Sports Museum. Each day, the biggest crowd gathers to watch a 3D film of Warne discussing his career as he saunters around the MCG changing-rooms. As ever, he holds his audience spellbound.

His charity work could be another deterrent to playing again, but one letter writer in The Age (Melbourne) believes that he has the solution to that. He and his mates would come up with $1,000, he wrote. It would need only 999 further such donations to produce a million for the Shane Warne Foundation in exchange for his return.

One thing is certain. If Australia fail to win in Nagpur, then struggle in the home series against New Zealand that starts in a fortnight, the calls for Warne will become a clamour.

And if Ponting remains under a critical public microscope for much longer — say, beyond the home series against South Africa next month — the trump card of the captaincy Warne never had but always coveted could conceivably be floated to test his resolve. One more Ashes series? Probably not. But don’t discount it just yet.