They say that nine times out of ten when you win the toss in Test cricket, you choose to bat. The other time, you think about bowling, but you still bat.

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In sport, as in politics, the link between intent and outcome is habitually overstated.

So, when things don't go as planned, there's always fate: "it was a good toss to lose".

The Liberal Party faced a coin-toss after being smashed in 2025.

Heads was Sussan Ley - Peter Dutton's incurious deputy who had been unfazed by the Queenslander's scoffing contempt for ex-Liberal voters plumping the Teal wave.

Tails was Angus Taylor, Dutton's flint-dry shadow treasurer-turned cheery convert to higher taxes and increased borrowing.

In a close party room ballot that might have gone either way, it was felt that Ley sent the clearer signal of a Liberal Party appropriately chastened.

Liberals seemed to be acknowledging the message from their own base about careening off to the right, about fanning divisions and ignoring women.

Yet for all that positive intent, it was uncanny how quickly the fatalism of cricket's dressing room rationalised a new meaning.

Perhaps that is because it was clear to Taylor and the other right wingers, that the 2025 post-election leadership race had always been a good one to lose.

To animate this point, consider the counterfactual. Imagine for a moment, that Taylor had triumphed narrowly in that first match-up. It seems plausible that the party would still have struggled under his command and that its continued decline would become his baggage rather than hers.

Right now, then, in February 2026, Ley might well be a newly installed leader explicitly tasked with charting a course back to Australia's electoral motherlode.

This, admittedly unproveable scenario, hardly relies on outlandish assumptions. For instance, it is plain from his current priorities that Taylor's instincts lean closer to populism than something explicitly metropolitan or distinct from Duttonism.

References to "bad" immigration and the need to defend "Australian values" under attack such as the flag, the constitution and Australia Day, mirror the bleatings of outsider grievance rather than the inclusive-progressive instincts of the metropolitan liberal tradition.

Quite deliberately, Taylor is leading a shift to the cultural right for the Coalition. Unless he is entirely flaky, it is entirely reasonable to assert that these would have been his values if promoted nine months ago.

Even if partly successful, the girding of his party's right flank in the regions would have cost support in the cities where the major populations are.

Remember, Ley's worst polls followed her partisan aggression post-Bondi.

This is not to ignore the reality that primary support of just 15 per cent for the Liberal Party under Ley's leadership, was untenable.

Rather, it is to point out two things: (i) pretty-well any leader appointed straight after Dutton's weird vote-shedding experiment would carry deep brand-damage, and (ii) Ley's decline in the polls was not for being too progressive or "Labor-lite" - but for being insufficiently true to her clearly enunciated moderate reform promise.

As James Paterson noted when withdrawing confidence in Ley's leadership, the crisis was well underway before Ley.

"At the last election, which was the Coalition's most devastating defeat, almost five million Australians voted for us ... Over the last nine months, according to the most recent opinion polls, 2.1 million of those people have since deserted the Coalition," he said.

"That's more than 200,000 votes a month. It's more than 50,000 votes a week. It's more than 7000 votes a day. This cannot go on. If it goes on, there'll be nothing left of the Liberal Party by the next election."

Taylor and his supporters always intended a second tilt, aware that leaders installed immediately after a severe loss usually don't last. The question now is, will a third change emerge this term?

The odds favour it and history points to it. Just two years after the 2007 "Ruddslide" election, Tony Abbott was already the third to helm the opposition after Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull.

Some Liberals accept that if savage polls were a trigger for removing Ley, they would be no less compelling as a trigger as an election nears. Quite the opposite.

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It is telling in this respect that Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa-Price, the two most self-regarding populists in the Liberals' party-room, have been re-drawn into Taylor's shadow cabinet.

Presumably, Taylor reasoned that having them inside the tent would impose some constraints on their freelancing ways. Hastie, who conspicuously reads The Art of War during Question Time, has even been gifted the novel post of Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Reps.

This might work, but it also elevates the news-weight of a strategic resignation (as both renegades managed under Ley). At the right moment, that could fracture Taylor's authority.

Meanwhile a closer danger for Australia is not the trials of the Liberal Party, but the less-recognised pull that populist nationalism is exerting on the Labor government also.

Witness the brash "We have no sympathy" statements from the Prime Minister regarding women and children trapped in Syria. Children. Australian citizens.

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