With such a collective failure against the Texans, a second-year team, how much of the blame lies with the head coach, someone asked.
Despite a rare failure against Pakistan, in five matches he has scored 242 runs at an average of over 60 and a strike-rate of 154 - hitting 15 sixes in the process - and has also chipped in with 11 wickets, many of them crucial.
Instead, it has been a stretch of stunning mediocrity — a sorry defeat against the Minnesota Timberwolves, an expected failure against the Denver Nuggets, and only modest success against the Charlotte Bobcats.
Even then, Australia failed to fully capitalise on the second-wicket stand of 182 between Smith and Finch, as Michael Clarke's men were stunted by the off-breaks of Ravichandran Ashwin and a curious collective failure against back-of-a-length bowling.
One lesson was "a failure to guard against optimism and build in a margin for prudence against unexpected events".
And a failure to stand against the use of chemical weapons would weaken prohibitions against other weapons of mass destruction and embolden Assad's ally, Iran, which must decide whether to ignore international law by building a nuclear weapon or to take a more peaceful path.
After an early failure against Pakistan, Watson will be hoping for something bigger today.
"A few demons came out of the cupboard when it started raining," said Ellis, recalling an infamous failure against England in Sydney in the 2003 World Cup semi-final.
Part of the White House strategy for securing Congressional support now is to emphasize not only what Syria did, but also how a failure to act against Syria might embolden enemies of Israel like Iran and Hezbollah.
Plus, even if authorities fail to act on alerts it points out that the system provides a timestamped record of logging activity which can be connected to local authority action (or inaction) against it — so it could be used to hold corrupt local authorities to account for a failure to act against deforestation, for instance.
