Undeniably, Australia are showing symptoms that are worrying from their point of view. But you don’t pronounce recession on the basis of one poor quarter. Just as the American economy is being tested after the collapse of a few giants, so too is Australia’s cricket. We need to see more, actually much more than we have with the US economy, before the challengers can come together and celebrate. The King is not yet dead!

Often great teams bounce back after small reverses. They analyse themselves relentlessly, they identify weaknesses and seek to plug them. That is what world cricket will be watching very closely. Can this Australian team fight back from being one down? Inevitably comparisons will be drawn with the Ashes of 2005 where, more than anything else, Australia couldn’t adapt to being down in a series. In his interesting book, their former coach John Buchanan, has a quote that best explains performance. “We are what we repeatedly do” and Australia repeatedly win. They do so because they back themselves to play bold, attacking cricket. They play with the confidence that their style is the most conducive to winning matches. It is an approach that depends on complete self-belief.

My suspicion is that when Australia are down, they begin to question this belief a bit. And when the mind is not certain, it translates into attitude. Make no mistake, they will still come hard but in their mind they will wonder if this is the best way of doing it. Just as ordinary teams are confused in sight of victory because it is not something they “repeatedly do” (witness Bangladesh losing to New Zealand earlier this week from a winning position), so too do teams like Australia when they are down. They haven’t been in these situations often enough. That is when they are most vulnerable. The Test match in Delhi will have the world watching!

Should they lose the series there, a crop of inexperienced players, the future of Australian cricket, will be made aware of the fact that they can lose. To an earlier generation, Brett Lee and Adam Gilchrist for example, the initiation years only saw victory. They grew quickly, learnt to win and kept the Aussie juggernaut going. Now if the Johnsons and Whites and Haddins begin their careers with defeat, their mindset will be different. It is there that Australia’s greatest challenge lies.

In the eyes of some, India also have a challenge ahead of them. And it concerns one of their greatest ever cricketers. Amit Mishra took seven wickets in his debut Test and in doing so has presented the selectors with a very pleasant alternative. However, we need to look beyond the immediate. Mishra was a replacement for Anil Kumble and when the original selection is fit and able, the replacement loses out. That is how it has always been; certainly with good teams.

So, would that be hard on Mishra? No. He has taken a giant leap from being one of many possible replacements to being next in line. Three weeks ago he wasn’t in the India ‘A’ side and for him to come this far shows he is a seasoned cricketer, very good at taking his opportunity. In course of time, he will have to produce many more such performances and he has shown that he is perfectly capable of doing it. But the man he seeks to replace is a legend, an ageing legend recently fallen on hard times to be fair, but one the selectors believe is good enough to be captain.

The key issue is not to ask if Kumble is better than Mishra, for that will embarrass Mishra no end, but to see if Kumble is as good as he has been. All great players, including Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara, go through bad patches and each time the question to be asked is: is the ailment terminal? I suspect the answer to that lies not in Mishra’s leg breaks but in Kumble’s shoulder.