When you go into a Test match looking for a record 17th consecutive win, you have to be backing your chances. Australia tried this feat before — that time, in Kolkata 2001, they appeared to hold it in their fists, had forced a follow-on. Only to see V V S Laxman and Rahul Dravid post 461 runs between the two of them and push that dream 172 runs off its target. India proceeded to Chennai to win the decider and clinch the three-Test series, and Steve Waugh, then Australia captain, had failed to conquer “the last frontier” — that is, to win a series in India.

Ricky Ponting’s Australia are, on paper, better placed after Perth. In a four-Test series, they have won Melbourne and Sydney. From here, the Border-Gavaskar Trophy cannot be lost.

When then do they already speak of “the end of the era?”

Memories in cricket can be conveniently short, so if this era is Australia’s streak since losing the Ashes to England in the summer of 2005, it is obviously over. The statistician has said so. But a couple of losses after 16 Tests were just an interlude until Waugh gathered his men and went on to flaunt his team as perhaps the best in history.

This era that hints at its own end at Perth is much longer than Ponting’s 16-win streak.

It began in the West Indies in 1995, when Mark Taylor’s Australia, fortified by a double century by Waugh at Kingston at a time when Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh breathed dread into batsmen, won a series in the Caribbean after more than 20 years. West Indian supremacy was at an end, the baton had been passed.

... contd.