or Nasser Hussain, it ended with two fours and a single off Chris Martin, strokes that took him to a 14th Test century in his 96th game. At the age of 36, his reflexes weren't what they once were, but it wasn't his body's deterioration that forced his hand.

"What I wasn't willing to do was fight against youth, and that doesn't mean my youth, but youth in the form of Andrew Strauss, who put his hand up by coming into the side and scoring a lot of runs," he said afterwards. Hussain's final game was Strauss's first. He scored 112 and 83 in that match and more than seven years on, is one of only three English captains to have won the Ashes home and away.

Hussain wasn't as gifted as any of India's middle-order stalwarts, but he timed that most difficult of decisions perfectly. It's almost a cliché that you give a great player one game too many than one too few, but in reality most become too rheumy-eyed to read the exit signs.

Kapil Dev took just 24 wickets in his final 12 Tests and his pursuit of Richard Hadlee's record hampered Javagal Srinath's progress, while also ensuring that Abey Kuruvilla would never play for India when at his liveliest. Across the border, Javed Miandad carried on till he was nearly 39. By the time he played his final game, a World Cup quarterfinal loss to India, he was a sad parody of the batsman whose last-ball six in Sharjah a decade earlier had traumatised the opposition for years.

Viewing sport through a numerical prism alone can be a bloodless exercise, but sometimes figures say far more than words. Eight years ago, when India enjoyed their best tour of Australia, Tendulkar, Dravid and Laxman scored four hundreds and five half-centuries between them. Four years later, though India lost the series, they combined for three centuries and six other scores in excess of 50. This time, they have four half-centuries between them, and a highest score of 47 in the final two Tests. In that time, Virat Kohli, the least experienced man in the line-up, has made 44, 75 and 116.

indsight is a wonderful thing. Most believed that India had picked the strongest squad possible for this tour. But once the defeats in Melbourne and Sydney confirmed that the batting meltdowns in England were not an aberration but a sure sign of irreversible decay, change should have been swift. Instead, India sleepwalked on, not even bothering to change the batting order as it lived up to Dravid's pre-series jest about "creaking Terminators".

It's easy to take shots at the senior players for not knowing when to go, but the reality is that it's the selectors and tour management that have taken the cowards' way out. When players make pathetic remarks along the lines of "Wait till they come to India", it says as much about the establishment mindset as it does of their own insecurities. In a culture that didn't tolerate excuses, no one would dare articulate such a thought.

After eight successive blowouts on the road, several lofty reputations lie in tatters. No passage of play illustrated India's plight quite like the ferocious spell that Peter Siddle bowled to Laxman on the fourth afternoon. He survived, but with Siddle touching 150km/hr at times, it was like watching an aging boxer clinging to the ropes to stay on his feet.

Regardless of where the big three go from here – and let's hope it's not down the Kapil-Miandad route – Indian fans would do well to eviscerate these two tours from memory. For more than a decade, these same men made a country proud, taking Indian cricket to heights it had never scaled before. This ignominious end shouldn't obscure that.

In one of the greatest sports pieces ever written, Sports Illustrated's Frank Deford said this of Johnny Unitas, the Baltimore Colts quarterback who was also a boyhood hero. "Ultimately, you see, what he conveyed to his teammates and to Baltimore and to a wider world was the utter faith that he could do it. He could make it work. Somehow, he could win. He would win. It almost didn't matter when he actually couldn't. The point was that with Johnny U, it always seemed possible. You so very seldom get that, even with the best of them. Johnny U's talents were his own. The belief he gave us was his gift."

Even as we move on, the gifts these three men gave us shouldn't be forgotten.