Australian cricket is dead, long live Australian cricket!

Australia’s harrowing 74-run loss in the fourth Test at Durham on Monday saw them surrender a third successive Ashes series to arch-rivals England. The loss, triggered by Stuart Broad’s brilliant six-wicket haul, saw the tourists trailing 3-0 in the five-Test series, with next week’s final Test at The Oval now reduced to just a formality.

Clarke’s men now have the distinction of completing a losing Ashes streak matched only by the struggling Australia teams of 1953-1956 in the post-War era.

The important thing here is not the loss, but the way they lost. It’s difficult to digest how can a team, chasing a modest 299-run target, collapse to 224 all out from 109-0! The manner of the capitulation, losing nine wickets in a single session, clearly shows there’s something fundamentally wrong with Australian cricket.

Is it because of the team’s failure to adapt to a changing reality and their over-reliance on former glories? Is it because they are, continually, unable to come to terms with the fast-changing reality?

Harking back to the past is irrelevant in this ever-changing and ever-evolving game, and it’s high time pundits running the game Down Under realise that the golden period of Australian cricket is over. As a case study, they only need to look at the West Indies.

What happened to Australia’s famed bench strength? Isn’t it rather ironical that they had to fall back upon a 36-year-old Chris Rogers - who last week became the second oldest Australian, at 35 years and 344 days, to hit a maiden Test century - to solve their opening woes! In fact, Rogers played only one Test before his surprise call-up, against India in 2008!

Why, they even fast-tracked the Australian citizenship of a 32-year-old leg-spinner called Fawad Ahmed, who was seeking asylum in the country after fleeing Pakistan owing to death threats from extremists. Why this dearth of talent?

There was a time when Australians used to take pride and show arrogance in saying that they have a replacement for every player in the line-up - not one, but three “outstanding chaps” vying for one position at any given time, they used to say. Now, it’s almost three years since the retirements of Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist, and nearly a year since Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey called it a day. Has anyone come in to fill the void?

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Perhaps, it’s time Australia overhauled their domestic cricket structure. Several former players have voiced their concern over the crammed domestic schedule in the recent past. A structure that was once known as an excellent platform for budding talents to graduate to the next stage now seems to hinder instead of helping the progress of young cricketers. High time the people concerned woke up and took note before it’s too late.