Across three years since Shane Warne retired, the Australian selectors have tried nine specialist spin bowlers in their search for an adequate Test replacement.
Of those, Nathan Hauritz was persisted with for longest, but the manner of his omission has been the most cruel.
Had chairman Andrew Hilditch and his panel intended to dent the psyche of Hauritz, a man of honesty but wavering self-confidence, they could not have gone about his demotion any differently.
Where Hauritz will go from here is questionable, and how he will rebuild belief in his methods, after having them dismantled by the advice of his captain Ricky Ponting, moreso.
When Hauritz was first called back into the Australian Test team in 2008 to replace the injured Jason Krejza – another hard luck story – it was a genuine surprise.
For a time he made decent strides, with the brief interruption of a curious absence from the final Ashes Test of 2009 at the Oval, and at home last summer appeared to have arrived as a Test spinner with the capability to influence the outcome of matches.
This year’s winter tour of England was missed due to injury, placing Hauritz in the unfortunate position of returning from convalescence against the best players of spin bowling in the world in India.
All the groundwork duly began to unravel on the subcontinent, where Hauritz’s modest gifts of spin and fizz were made irrelevant by self-doubt about his own best method of attack, which had been placed there not by the Indians, but by Ponting.
Having called for his spinner to bowl more like Harbhajan Singh – a technical impossibility – Ponting watched as Hauritz was taken apart, losing his all-important ability to maintain pressure.
This quality is what had brought him into the team in the first place, then kept him there as a foil for the wayward Mitchell Johnson.
Bruised inside and out by India, Hauritz expected to make amends during the Ashes, and the selectors’ decision to play him in the Sheffield Shield rather than one day cricket against Sri Lanka would have enhanced that notion.
But early season rain and a startling limited overs debut by Xavier Doherty did not help, and despite improving with every ball at the SCG against Victoria, Hauritz was made to feel more uncertain when the 17-man Ashes squad was named.
As former Test paceman Stuart Clark has suggested, players prefer to be shown confidence than to feel the axe at their necks, and Hauritz went into a final Shield encounter with Tasmania a worried man.
In this match, weighted far too heavily as a Test trial, he was only granted one over.
At its end Hauritz was maddeningly told by Hilditch and Ponting that he had not done enough to convince he was the right man for Brisbane, even though the past year had given the distinct impression that he was a choice for the long haul.
Like the victim of a relationship gone badly, Hauritz was left to ponder the worth of all that had gone before, and it is impossible to look upon him as the guilty party.
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