World Cup: That losing feeling is new for Australians

Ricky Ponting’s men would have woken up on Sunday nursing their bruised egos, scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong — barring the skipper himself, none of them knew what it felt like to lose a World Cup match.

That reality would have hit them, and hit them hard, after they were outwitted, outclassed and outplayed by Pakistan on Saturday in a Group A showdown. After such a huge blow, Ponting faces perhaps the most testing days of his captaincy as he tries to lift the morale of his team going into next week’s knock-out phase.

“We are good enough to get out of this. We have to learn from this result,” Ponting said moments after the loss.

All-rounder Steve Smith was a nine-year-old school boy the last time the Australians lost a match in the showpiece event — and that was 12 years ago after which the world champions stitched together a 34-match unbeaten streak.

They will live to fight another day since Saturday’s defeat was in a round-robin match which did not have much riding on it and they had already qualified for the quarterfinals.

Ponting wanted to emphasise this point rather than dwell on his first Cup defeat as captain. “To be honest, the loss hurts us a lot but we hadn’t lost a game in the last 34 matches. So we haven’t done badly,” said the 36-year-old, who is the only survivor from the team that went down to Pakistan in the 1999 Cup defeat.

They returned from that setback to win the trophy and added two in 2003 and 2007 that followed. “We found ourselves in some tough situations. We have to learn quickly. If you look at our team, it’s reasonably well balanced.”

Was it the tactics? Was it fatigue? Overconfidence, or a combination of those things? Why pick Smith instead of the more experienced David Hussey if the 21-year-old’s services as a leg-spinner would not be required?  Were Ponting’s men simply too complacent since they had not lost a Cup match for so long?

Whatever the cause, the captain knows he has to address the problems — and quickly — as one more slip-up and they will be out of the competition. The last time they failed to reach a World Cup final was in 1992.