CAITLIN BASSETT: Pat Cummins needs honest conversations with Steve Smith, Marnus Labuschagne, Usman Khawaja

Getting to the top of the world is hard, but staying there is harder — just ask the Australian men’s cricket team.

But a heavy defeat in The West Test in Perth this week — one of their heaviest ever on home soil — has them crashing back down to earth.

When you are the No.1 team in the world you constantly have a target on your back, every team wants the satisfaction and confidence that comes from beating the top dog.

High performance sport is not just about being the best, it’s about sustaining that success and creating an environment that constantly adapts to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Doing the same thing just because it’s worked in the past will only work for so long and now is the ideal time for the team to have some honest conversations about what is no longer best for the group.

This is not to say they need to make wholesale changes — and they have already announced they won’t be — but a review of what’s working and what can be changed before the next Test would be smart.

Ten days is not enough time for a complete deep dive, but it is plenty to have a meeting and make a few tweaks.

They don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater — they don’t have time to anyway — and they will want to prove that Perth was only a blip, but you can’t let series like this drift away.

There has been a lot of talk about the age of the team and while Nathan McSweeney is a fresh face, the other players would have a very set routine and know what they want a tour to look like, which will make change difficult.

A mini-crisis like this is the perfect time to lift the rug and check in on some of the issues that may have been swept under it during successful times.

I remember sitting down after we lost the Commonwealth Games final in 2018 and receiving direct feedback from my Diamonds teammates on my leadership and how things were running.

It was hard to hear, but it made me adapt the way that I led and I made changes. It helped bring me closer to the group and when you have that trust and respect, hard conversations are made easier.

At times, winning is not particularly fun and sustained success doesn’t come easy. You need to do the hard yards to be able to celebrate the good moments.

That needs to be led by the senior players, including captain Pat Cummins, who conceded after the Perth defeat they “had a bit of work to do over the next 10 days”.

The pressure will increase in Adelaide, where they have an excellent record and don’t often lose facing the pink ball, and it ramps up on individuals like Usman Khawaja, Steve Smith and the struggling Marnus Labuschagne because their careers could hang off the rest of this series.

The Australian team can’t change decisions made in the past, including letting David Warner play another year and opening with Smith, but they can be proactive in making changes for the future.