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 replacements on display.

For Andrew McDonald and Pat Cummins, as coach-captain axis of the Australian team for three years and counting, the approach has always been about cool and composure. Their mantra has been to avoid overreacting to performances, whether good or bad. Nobody is unstoppable, nobody is terrible. Even after his team took two hammerings in India last year, ending with a collective neurological fritz while batting in Dehli, Cummins was calm as a lilo afternoon. Australia went on to win the third Test of the series and draw the fourth.

Their approach is probably right. It’s probably the most sustainable. But that doesn’t help soothe people who are angry. When they’re angry, being calm and reasonable makes it worse. It chafes. Sustainability is what a lot of Cummins’ critics most dislike about him. They would prefer to watch things burn.