It hasn't been all beer and skittles for Australia in the lead-up to the two-Test series against Pakistan in England.
The ODI series loss to England left a bitter taste and decisive defeats by Pakistan in both of the Twenty20 internationals were as unwelcome as they were unexpected.
Perhaps the Australians have been focusing more on the coming Ashes campaign than the task at hand.
If so, then Pakistan has the potential to make them pay in the Test series which starts at Lord's on Tuesday.
Five months after losing every match in all three forms of the game on their disastrous 2009-10 tour of Australia the Pakistanis have regrouped with a young squad under the consolidated captaincy of Shahid Afridi.
The Australians will be encountering several of those youngsters - including Umar Amin, Wahab Riaz and Azhar Ali - for the first time at this level which will make the opposition harder to plan for.
The T20 series demonstrated that Pakistan will be a tougher proposition on neutral territory where the conditions, and the Duke ball, suit its pace attack.
Teenage lefty Mohammad Aamer delivered a reminder of his prodigious talent with three wickets in each of the T20s, medium-pacer Umar Gul found form and it has Mohammad Asif up its sleeve for the Tests.
There's not quite the same menace about its batting line-up, but Umar Akmal warmed-up with a match-winning 64 from 31 balls in the Lord's T20 and he's more than capable of building on that in the Tests.
While Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey got amongst the runs in the two-day match against Derbyshire, the Australians have no recent form with bat or ball outside the ODIs and T20s to recommend them.
Simon Katich, who's been playing county cricket with Lancashire, would have preferred to play two four-day matches before the Tests while Ben Hilfenhaus and Peter George are the only bowlers in the squad to have played any meaningful four-day cricket in the past month.
Twenty-three-year-old George, a replacement for the injured Ryan Harris, claimed 11 wickets at 15.27 in two matches for Australia A against Sri Lanka A while Hilfenhaus snared a five-for in his only appearance in that series.
Mitchell Johnson was the pick of the Australian bowlers against Derbyshire and will be looking for better figures in the Test than the 3-200 he returned against the backdrop of family dramas in his last appearance at Lord's on the 2009 Ashes campaign.
Australia will almost certainly have two debutants at Lord's where Tim Paine will keep wicket and all-rounder Steven Smith will assume the No.1 spin role in the absence of the injured Nathan Hauritz.
Smith and Paine, who's just a notch below Brad Haddin as a batsman and a notch above with the gloves, are both Test stars in the making.
The popular view is that Smith's leg-spin bowling not yet up to Test standard, but his hitting at No.7, No.8 or, perhaps, down the track at No.6, is clean and powerful.
Back-up batsman Usman Khawaja appears unlikely to get a start at Lord's or the following Test at Leeds, but the 23-year-old left-hander is excited just to be involved in a series against the country of his birth.
This series is the first involving neutral countries to be hosted in England in almost a century, but both teams can look forward to strong support.
Australia has the benefit of having won its past 12 Tests against Pakistan, a run stretching back to November 1995.
Winning runs tend to come to an end eventually, however, as the Aussies experienced on their most recent visit to Lord's last year when they lost to the hosts there for the first time since 1934.