“Reckon me Mum and Dad’ll still talk to me. And me wife. But who else?” Thus Kim Hughes in 1981 after Australia had lost the Ashes during that tumultuous summer, and he was right, being never quite forgiven.

“Whatever you do,” Ian Chappell told Hughes’s successor, Allan Border, expressing a time-honoured prime directive of Australian cricket, “don’t lose to the Poms.”

Now that Ricky Ponting has done it twice, he is clearly expecting a warm reception in Australia, and on Sunday night was anxious to say that he shared national sorrow: “I don’t think you can be more disappointed than I am now.”

Yet Ponting, bearing the scars of his fielding misadventures, was also putting the best face on his team’s performance, saying that he was “very proud of the whole group” — and in this he was not wrong. A bowling attack without a single Test match in England between them has kept the home side to only two centuries. A batting line-up in which only the captain had made a Test century here will be much better players for the challenges they have tackled.

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I was staggered by the decision to leave out Hauritz

Shane Warne

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Decision that cost us the Ashes

Shane Warne could not believe that Australia's selectors chose not to include off spinner Nathan Hauritz at the Oval

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An inexperienced team, moreover, has learnt a great deal about the essence of team success, and how it differs from individual accomplishment. For there are lies, damned lies, and then there are the batting and bowling averages of the 2009 Ashes, which show Australians as the top three wicket-takers and six of the top seven run-scorers.

For Ponting the individual, the series will also have been formative. One suspects that, as it did Warne, McGrath and Gilchrist in 2005, defeat will probably prolong his career. It was surprising to hear Ponting speak so emphatically about his desire to play on, without obfuscating or pleading for time to reflect, into the Ashes of 2010-11, and perhaps even farther. To make such a statement so unequivocally in the shadow of defeat bespeaks considerable determination.

Whatever the case, and whatever the reception, the reality is that the captaincy is his for as long as Ponting deigns it. For all his merits, Michael Clarke cannot captain Australia from No 5; no other batsman is remotely equipped to succeed Ponting at No 3.

The difference between Kim Hughes and Ponting, moreover, is that the cap on Hughes never quite fitted, where the cap on Ponting’s head is faded, battered, very proudly sported and universally respected.

Ashes fact

• Australia scored 2,886 runs in the series, compared with England’s 2,869. Of the ten centuries scored, only two came from England players, who hit three sixes to Australia’s ten