The current set-up lean towards playing it safe on team selection but after humiliation in Perth efforts to project calm can be dissembling

With 10 days between the early end of the Perth Test and the start of Adelaide, this is the Australian cricket supporter witching hour. They can cope with a close loss to an opponent doing something special: nobody was burning effigies in the streets of Greenslopes earlier this year when Shamar Joseph on one foot bowled West Indies to a sizzling Gabba win. But it’s very different after a beating like the one that India just handed out, when an Australian team that was storming the field after two sessions failed to fire a shot for the next seven.

Now, those supporters are angry. They’re swarming talkback lines, writing to papers, voicing disdain in pubs. They can’t stand a team looking incompetent, they want to know what will be done to avoid that happening again. And they have a lot of time on their hands, with no Test player due to face or bowl a ball at any other level in the interim, while a Sheffield Shield round plays out with plenty of potential replacements on display.