When John O'Grady called his best-selling story of the adventures of an Italian immigrant They're A Weird Mob, he was referring primarily to the beaut, bonzer, ridgy-didge Australian version of the English language. He might just as easily have been talking about Australian sports fans. For few mobs, it has to be said, are quite so perverse: they are happy only when their teams are winning everything in sight, yet they love nothing better than a gutsy, earnest loser.

It explains why Pat Rafter, the Queensland-born tennis player who lives in Bermuda to avoid the pesky rigmarole of paying taxes, was crowned Australian of the Year in January. Victory in two US Opens had previously confirmed Rafter as a high-class athlete, but it was only after losing two Wimbledon finals that he won a place in our hearts.

A similar phenomenon has been at play in the days since Steve Waugh's men were named Team of the Year at the Laureus World Sports Awards in Monte Carlo. This was no mean feat. A cricket side virtually nobody had heard of was ranked ahead of, among others, the LA Lakers, Bayern Munich and Ferrari - sporting superteams which are as much a part of the contemporary lexicon as Coke, Madonna and terrorism. Yet the reaction back home was one giant stifled yawn.

On one hand this might be viewed as a healthy thing; proof of a mature, intelligent society that does not need to bathe in a river of self-congratulation every time its athletes enjoy a bit of success. But this is Australia we're talking about. Australians will happily embrace Pin The Tail On The Donkey as a major spectator event just as soon as we produce a world champion.

No, the general air of indifference had more to do with the way Australians feel about their cricketers: they respect the team's collective skill but care little for the players as individuals. Steve Waugh doesn't smile enough. Mark Waugh doesn't care enough. Justin Langer cares too much. Ricky Ponting is too laddish. Brett Lee is too effeminate. Glenn McGrath is too foul-mouthed. Jason Gillespie used to have a pony-tail. Adam Gilchrist is an OK bloke but not as OK as Ian Healy was. And Shane Warne is guilty of all the above - except the ponytail - and is arrogant, boastful, overweight and deceitful to boot.

Or so the story goes. In truth, these criticisms are over-simplified stereotypes that say more about us than our cricketers. They stem partly from the national obsession with hacking down tall poppies, and partly from the growing realisation that the current Australian side are the tallest poppies of them all.

Traditionally, Australia's most powerful cricketing dynasties are thought to be the 1921 and 1948 teams led by Warwick Armstrong and Don Bradman. Yet, in both cases, their only real opposition came from creaking, war-ravaged England sides. The 1950s and 1960s spawned a swag of celebrated sporting teams: our tennis players strung together 15 Davis Cup victories in 18 years; the Melbourne Demons won five Aussie Rules flags in six years; and the St George Dragons won 11 straight rugby league premierships.

But, again, who did they have to beat? Australia's only serious tennis rivals were the US and a handful of well-to-do European nations, while the Demons and Dragons did not even play against - let alone defeat - a single team beyond the Victorian or New South Wales borders respectively.

It is quite plausible, then, that Steve Waugh's men are not only the greatest sporting team in the world, but the greatest Australian sporting team ever. And it is this that makes us wary of them. They have not helped themselves when they have lost by blaming their defeats on one-off, supposedly unstoppable, freak performances: Brian Lara at Bridgetown, VVS Laxman at Calcutta, Harbhajan Singh at Chennai, Mark Butcher at Headingley. The reality on each occasion was that Australia's bowlers or batsmen - or both - lost the plot once a smidgen of pressure was applied. Had they admitted as much they might have seemed that much more likeable.

For the one thing Australians cherish more than a sporting hero is a flawed sporting hero. Since the Australian of the Year award began in 1960 it has been won twice by cricketers: Mark Taylor in 1999, after he had endured the direst run of outs of any modern skipper, and Allan Border in 1989, when he finally tasted Ashes success after four barren years as captain. The four most gifted players of the era - Richie Benaud, Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell and Shane Warne - have never had a look in.

Warne, of course, is seen as the living embodiment of everything unsavoury about Australian cricketers. His latest misdemeanour occurred a couple of weeks ago when he was asked whether personal details about an opponent, such as extra-marital affairs, were fair game for sledging. "Probably, yeah," was Warne's response. It was hardly a villainous comment and he said it on The Footy Show - a nonsensical forum that encourages outrageous statements. But that did not deter an army of commentators from writing Warne off yet again as "a prize prat" and praising the lord that he never got the captaincy. As ever, where Warne is concerned, the punishment outweighed the crime.

Let's not obsessively hero-worship our cricketers. But let's not damn them for their foibles either. After all, there are two fair-dinkum certainties about the current Australian team. They won't be around forever and, once they're gone, we will all be wailing in our beers and bemoaning the fact that they don't make Australian cricketers the way they used to.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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