If you had proclaimed, this time last year, that Steve Waugh should be replaced as Australia's one-day captain, your Aussie friends would have turned into frosty acquaintances and suggested you had your head read. Australia, after all, had sailed through the 2000-01 season with a perfect score – five Test wins out of five against West Indies, and ten out of ten in the one-day series against the Windies and Zimbabwe. So what has changed? Steve Waugh asked the same question of the Australian press, which he sensed had turned against him. The answer, of course, is quite simple: Australia had lost that nice winning habit. They struggled to register one victory in four attempts against New Zealand, and that – and the small print of the bonus-point system – meant the Australians didn't even qualify for the final of their annual triangular beanfeast.

If Sir Alex Ferguson loses three out of four against Manchester City next season he'll soon be regretting postponing his retirement. Australia losing three out of four, especially to New Zealand, is worse than that. It also cost the Australian Board a lot of money, as hardly anyone turned up to watch the South Africa-New Zealand finals, or the "mockbuster" as the local press cruelly tagged it.

So Waugh's removal as Australia's one-day captain is the price for that failure. He hasn't helped himself much this season, with a spat with an umpire and a couple of press-conference stage whispers that weren't quite stagey enough. By the end of the season a man who started off on great terms with the press corps seemed to think they were rotten to the core.

But his biggest problem has been runs. He wasn't quite himself in the Tests, scoring only 219 runs at 27.37 in six matches, with a best score of 90 at Melbourne. That ended when he was narrowly run out, but hung around to discuss the decision with Darrell Hair. From the outer it looked as if Waugh hadn't realised that Hair had given him out without calling for the replays, but the later fine from the match referee suggested there must have been a word or three as well.

And in eight outings in the one-day series Waugh still wasn't his usual self. There were 187 runs at 31.16 – not bad for a No. 5, but not great either in a struggling side. In those three defeats by New Zealand he contributed only 15, 9 and 30.

You could tell that even the Iceman was feeling the heat when he suddenly marked out his run and started bowling in the last two qualifiers. Waugh hasn't bowled regularly in ODIs since the 1996 World Cup, because of a succession of injuries. Apart from a sublime burst of 3 for 29 against India a year ago he hadn't taken a one-day wicket since August 1999. But suddenly he was bouncing in and trying that slower ball, a delivery he was the first to perfect in one-day cricket. The trouble was that now the quicker balls looked remarkably like that slower one as well.

Waugh has said he's determined to fight his way back in to the one-day side. But it doesn't work like that in Australia ... just ask Mark Taylor. He had to put up with a couple of years of skippering in Tests but not in one-dayers. Taylor didn't enjoy it, finding it hard to wave goodbye to his team after a Test series and watch someone else waltz in to the captain's chair. Waugh is so combative that he won't just dislike it, he'll positively hate it. His next tour diary might well be an interesting read. But when you think you're the best one-day side in the world, and you finish third out of three at home ... it's time for a change. It must have been hard for the Australian selectors, but they grasped the nettle.

Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting have been touted as possible replacements. Gilchrist is likely to find juggling three jobs to be one too many, while Ponting has little captaincy experience. The adventurous - and probably best - option would be Shane Warne. Allan Border, another former captain and now a selector, wouldn't rule out Darren Lehmann when quizzed recently. That would be an interesting choice, as Lehmann wasn't even in the team until the later stages of the recent one-day series. And he's not currently in the Test side either, although that may change in South Africa.

Whoever gets the job (the new captain is being named in the next seven days) will have a tough act to follow – rather as Waugh himself did. But even Taylor didn't win the World Cup, which Waugh did. And the new man may well have to do it with one Waugh looking over his shoulder from the pavilion, and another scratching his nose in the slips. That's four gimlet eyes, before you count Steve's old mates in the press box. It won't be a bed of roses.

Steven Lynch is database director of Wisden.com.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd