When the Australian World Cup Empire crumbled in Lucknow

"Muskuraiye, aap Lucknow mein hai (Smile, you're on Lucknow)"

It's a tagline that Lucknowis mention often and also take a lot of pride in. In fact, you're greeted by locals right outside the airport insisting that you say the line on camera with a smile on your face, of course, while they record it for their Instagram reels.

To their credit, there is a lot to smile about in Lucknow. It's not just the kebabs either, though it is impossible to not be grateful to be alive the moment a Tunday kebab melts in your mouth. The city has an unmistakably welcoming vibe to it, but the hospitality isn't in your face nor shoved into you. They still largely let you be and let you soak in everything Lucknow has to offer.

Current-day Lucknow is a lovely blend of sky-rises, plush malls, an incessant number of high-end bars, and an old-school charm that it's somehow managed to retain. Dig deeper and you also realise this wonderfully classical city, a part of the Awadh region, has also witnessed several dominant empires rise but also then crumble, and quite dramatically too.

And you couldn't help but feel like we saw another one crumble at the Ekana Stadium on Thursday (October 12). It may sound a tad hyperbolic, but you can't deny that Australia at men's World Cups over the years have been more than just a dominant team. The five-time champions have, if anything, built a legacy that is worthy of being acknowledged as an empire over the years. And on a fateful night that they'd want to forget in a hurry, it felt like it was reduced to ruins as Australia crumbled to their worst-ever World Cup defeat, by 134 runs, against an inspired South African team.

This is Australia, after all. It's not like they never lose matches at a World Cup - even though they didn't for nearly 12 years before 2011. But they rarely, if ever, get embarrassed at a World Cup. What transpired on the field on Thursday was up there with one of the most disappointing performances you'd ever expect to see from an Australian team in a big event.

To the extent that you would struggle to know where to start in your post-mortem of their first defeat by over 100 runs since the 1983 World Cup. Maybe a sequence of five deliveries in Pat Cummins' final over of the game, the 49th in South Africa's innings might be an apt beginning.

Ironically, it came at a time when the Australian fast bowlers had pulled things back with a clever and effective ploy to go short at the South African power-hitters. The fact that the surface in Lucknow had slowed down enough to hold up balls pitched short, meant that Marco Jansen was struggling to get the big shots away after Aiden Markram had fallen to a similar delivery from Cummins. The plan also successfully managed to keep David Miller off strike, and what looked like a potential target of 350+ had now been dragged back closer to 300.

Now Cummins had Miller on strike, and the first ball once again held up enough for the left-hander to lose his timing and hit it straight to Glenn Maxwell at a shortish cover. Only for the all-rounder to let it slip through his legs and for Miller to get a couple of runs. Cummins stood by the stumps at his end and shook his head.

The next ball Miller attempted a hook shot, got a top-edge, and though Mitchell Starc got to the ball and clasped it, it slipped out when his elbows hit the ground. The next ball had Jansen playing a pull shot that caught the top off his bat and flew over Josh Inglis for four. Then came the Marcus Stoinis drop, the ball ballooning up yet again off Jansen's bat only to drop comfortably into the big Western Australian's palms and drop out. This time Cummins didn't even bother shaking his head. He simply turned around and walked back to the top of his mark. Now with Miller back on strike, because of the drop, you knew what was coming and so it did. Cummins missed his length for the first time in this phase of the innings and the length ball was clobbered deep into the eastern stands at Ekana Stadium. Just like that the pressure that they'd built had slipped away.

The glut of mistakes in this over was reflective of an overall fielding display from the Aussies that was both unflattering and rather unprofessional. There were plenty of other errors and a number of missed or dropped catches. It's not that Australian teams do not have bad days on the field. But rarely would you refer to them as having been clumsy or flat. But for large parts of their stint on the field, despite impressive spells with the ball from Maxwell and Josh Hazlewood, Cummins' team just looked to be a bit out of it.

And that feeling got even stronger as they went about their run-chase, losing wickets to mostly shots that apart from being poorly executed also seemed to lack a bit of conviction. Tentative attempts to break free against some brilliant bowling from Lungi Ngidi and Kagiso Rabada. And though they do have every right to be a bit hard done by with the Stoinis dismissal in particular, the game seemed already gone by then, as Marnus Labuschagne admitted himself.

Cummins did manage to connect with a few powerful blows with the bat, probably allowing himself to let out of some steam perhaps, before getting himself out in the process. He threw his head back and admonished himself after he holed out. You wonder if it was only his shot that he was disappointed with or if it was just everything about the day.

No wonder then that coach Andrew McDonald admitted that it was a "stunned" dressing-room that he'd witnessed at the end of the game.

"They're pretty stunned I think. They sit there, there's a lot of silence in the room and our job is to regroup and get moving towards Sri Lanka and they're quality players sitting in that dressing room and it's hard to keep a quality group down for long and we have been down for longer than we would like as a team, and we've just got to own that performance tonight."

"They're quality players and they're proud of their performance and they will respond. It's all hands on deck, it's a collective it goes from the coaches, support staff into the playing group, we all operate as one and we've got to respond to that. that's not a true reflection on our team. always believe that it will turnaround, the game doesn't keep you down for too long as long as you keep that positive mindset and keep moving forward. And that's our challenge at the moment and it's a pretty silent dressing room," he added.

It's safe to say that the Aussies have lost their smiles in Lucknow. The thing with history is as much as you can learn from the failings of others, you can also get inspired by stories of redemption. For every empire that has fallen in Lucknow, another more prosperous one has risen from the debris. And this historic city has managed to build itself back up.

Australia will have to do the same over the next few days and on Monday against the Sri Lankans. So that they have something to smile about on their way out of Lucknow. For, as it stands, just two matches in, their World Cup campaign already seems to be on the precipice and stands the risk of crumbling away for good.