Cricket: Mike Ticher on Steve Waugh

"Let the festivities begin" read one of the tamer T-shirts on display to commemorate Steve Waugh's final Test ("Tugger's Army - I'm pulling for Steve" expressed the same sentiment in slightly more earthy fashion).

But if Waugh's career has taught us and his self-satisfied army anything, it is surely that cricket is not a festivity - it is about winning.

It has been hard to find anyone here who has enjoyed Waugh's discomfort over the first three days of his final Test. Even for England supporters the pasting handed out by the Indian batsmen was so severe that it brought on a rare emotion - sympathy for the Australian captain.

Gareth, on holiday from London, said that by tea on the second day, with India at 495 for three, he was reaching the limit of his enjoyment in seeing Australia get a taste of their own medicine.

"I still want India to win, but I am starting to feel a bit sorry for Waugh out there in the boiling sun," he said.

Others went further. Derek Castle, originally from Macclesfield, said he was there in the hope of seeing Waugh score a century.

"I wouldn't wish ill on him, whatever he's done to England," he said. "He's a great bloke."

Clearly it is the fate of England fans to taste humiliating defeat even when they line up behind one of the most single-minded winners the game has ever seen.

But sympathy for Waugh? Call me churlish and petty-minded, but since when did the hardest man in world cricket offer sympathy to the victims of his relentless self-belief in what seem like dozens of Ashes thrashings? Respect, sometimes. Sympathy never.

The semi-religious fervour of his extended send-off in the Australian media has sharpened these slightly uncharitable feelings. While you cannot yet buy your own official battered baggy green, here a Sydney newspaper has been giving away copies of the other holy Waugh relic - his trademark red handkerchief.

Everyone who has so much as touched the hem of Stephen's cloak (never Steve to those that close, of course) in the past 30 years has had their say in the press tributes, from former team-mates to some bloke who played backyard cricket in the next suburb to the Waughs, even though he never actually met them. (The dredging of puntastic headlines finally struck bottom in Sydney's Sun-Herald, with a picture of Steve and Mark as youngsters captioned: Time Waughp.)

The miracles of the centuries with the broken hand and the shredded calf are blessed in the memory. Here, the veneration was completed by the presence of a fancy-dress Pope in the crowd.

Yet, as Waugh himself has so often pointed out, the moment you start taking something for granted is just when you deserve to lose it.

There is a certain neat symmetry in the fact that India have rammed home that point with distinctly Waugh-like ruthlessness. The lack of sentiment, and unforgiving desire in the tourists' batting seems to have come straight from the Waugh handbook.

Mental disintegration of the opponents was his catchphrase and at times his own team has looked perilously close to that state.

Sourav Ganguly's decision to bat on into the third morning, then declare once Brett Lee's figures topped the 200 mark, was pure Waugh.

When the hapless Stuart MacGill (the worst of what has somehow become a poor fielding side) dropped first Sachin Tendulkar then VVS Laxman after tea on Saturday the legspinner's home crowd turned on him, mingling boos with forlorn cries of "Warnie".

Waugh for once lost his cool, turning to the crowd and indicating his fury with them in some particularly vivid gestures.

This wasn't the love-in the final Test was meant to be. But then wasn't Waugh's whole point that nothing in cricket is "meant to be"? You have to make it happen yourself.

Waugh's whole career can be read as an attempt to bend the game to his own powerful will. It was a stupendous effort but not even Bradman could entirely achieve that.

Rather than the expected rollover, it is a more fitting tribute to Steve Waugh that his last Test will be seen in the same light as Bradman's - as proof that no cricketer is invulnerable.

Unless the old bastard scores a match-saving double hundred on the last two days, of course.