The people, then, have decided: Shane Watson must go. And so, almost certainly, he will. Watto, sweet Watto, we thought you’d give us the happy ending you deserved. Instead, 59 Tests, 3,731 runs, four – just four! – centuries and 24 – 24! – half-centuries later, it looks almost certain to finish like this: in a hail of caustic internet memes and with every known cricket watcher in Australia turned overnight into an expert on how to avoid the LBW trap while facing a seaming Dukes ball under greying English skies. How did we get here?

It all started so promisingly. A six-foot tall blond-haired Australian with boundless natural talent, a shirt-busting body and the willpower to bend a match with both bat and ball: this man should have inherited the cricketing earth. Alan Davidson, Richie Benaud, Steve Waugh: in the early years the greats of the local game were queueing up to hail Watto as the next messiah of Australian cricket, a homegrown all-rounder balm to our post-Freddie blues. But we all know what happened next: the nude calendar work, the frightened night in Brett Lee’s bedroom after seeing a ghost in Durham, the heart attack that turned out to be diarrhoea.

There was the memoir, Watto, released mid-career at the age of 30 before anything meaningful had been achieved. There were the injuries, many of them, dwarfed only in number by the jokes they spawned. Say what you want about Watto as a batsman, there can be little doubt he had the full range of pulls, nicks and nudges – all of them played from within the confines of his own hamstrings. There was the rejigged bowling action, the move away from weights and the embrace of pilates, the move up the order then back down the order, the constant debate – a national obsession – over whether Watto would be able to keep galloping in like an athletic fridge to send down those monotonous, clumping, sometimes successful looseners.

But above all, as the selectors have continued to indulge Watson’s long decade of potential, there has been the sense of a player who has steadfastly refused to play the part of the golden child that was thrust upon him from the start. Former coach Mickey Arthur claimed Michael Clarke considered Watson a “cancer on the team”, and as Watto’s booming potential has faded to a squeak, it’s been difficult to shift the images that entrench Watto’s status as an outcast: the hands in the pockets at slip, the forced banter with Clarke and Haddin in between deliveries, the sense, even through Australia’s post-Ashes celebrations in early 2014, that he was only pretending to enjoy himself.

Watson departs after being dismissed in that most-familiar of ways – leg before – in the second innings of the first Ashes Test in Cardiff. Photograph: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

This is why we should not cry for Watto. Nor should we decry him. Don’t rue the wasted potential, or the frazzled aggression, or the promising starts thrown carelessly away. Give Watto instead the place he deserves in Australian cricket’s rich tradition of outcasts – men who played the game at the highest level, sometimes even with distinction, but somehow never quite fitted in. There are two broad character types that run through the history of Australian cricket: the rebel-larrikins and the brooders. Keith Miller, Neil Harvey, Ian Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh, Merv Hughes, Shane Warne, Ian Healy, Ricky Ponting – these are the type of gregarious, expressive, hot-tempered, hard-drinking cricketers Australia likes.

But the greats of the 1970s – when our cricketing larrikinism was arguably in its pomp – famously detested Australia’s greatest player of all. Don Bradman was everything Chappell and his cohort were not: remote, spiky, formal, perhaps even a touch intellectual. These qualities made life difficult for Bradman during his playing career, but his supreme talent trumped all.

In the decades since, however, Bradman has emerged as a kind of spirit father to Australian cricket’s other story: the story of the non-conformists, the dressing room oddballs, the nearly-theres and the not-quite-evers. Several have followed in this less heralded personality mould. Stuart MacGill was so eccentric he drank wine; this, combined with his difficult, over-thinker’s character, made him a marginal presence in the Australian dressing room even in those moments when his career-long deputisation for Shane Warne was at its peak of success.

Simon Katich played with the neurotic, scratchy intensity of a post-punk frontman. At times throughout his career it was like watching David Byrne open the batting, his strokeplay a concatenation of yelps and squeaks through midwicket. He also gave good brood, as Clarke discovered one night via the application of a Katich hand to his throat. Kim Hughes resigned the national captaincy in tears because, essentially, Lillee and Marsh bullied him out of the job. It was great TV, and even better brooding. Ashley Mallett was Australia’s most successful offspinner until Nathan Lyon, but his contribution has arguably been overlooked amid the fallout of an epic personality clash with the rebel-larrikin and beloved Channel Nine commentator Bill Lawry. The brooder and the hooter: in history’s eyes, only one was going to win.

What makes Watson so special among this broody group is that, in contrast to many of the others, he looked the part of an all-Australian great. Most of the leading brooders were unlikely athletes: Bradman, Katich, MacGill. But Watto was different. Watto was tall. Watto was strong. Watto was handsome. Watto married a person off TV. Everything about the man, physically, had set him up for success. Perhaps part of the national envenomation towards Watson over the past few days comes from the misery of jilted expectations.

As a player, Watson never quite figured himself out. At the beginning of his career, he was known more for his bowling than his batting; in the frenzy of Cricket Australia’s post-2005 search for an answer to Andrew Flintoff, he became the solution to The All-Rounder Riddle; later he became a specialist opening batsman, in both forms of the game; then he was tasked with filling the Test team’s Ponting-sized hole at number three. On this Ashes tour, Watson has been preferred as a middle-order batsman over Mitchell Marsh, essentially, on the strength of his bowling. The thinking around how to play Watson has been some of the knottiest, most complex intellectual work produced in Australia this century.

In sympathy with these sudden, jolting shifts across the spectrum of play, Watson’s management of his own body has been, perhaps inevitably, similarly confused: bulky one day, lissom the next, he’s never hit on the best strategy to tune his frame – this fragile tuba – to its optimal pitch. It’s almost as if the man, having tested seemingly every position in the batting lineup and experimented with wildly divergent styles of bowling and muscular conditioning, has ended up estranged from himself. He’s become a stranger to his own physique.

In the process, he’s also become a stranger to the Australian dressing room. One of the most illuminating passages in Watto, his 2011 memoir, is where Watson describes his awkward teenage years:

“I never went to parties in high school because I always had cricket the next day, and I never used to smoke pot like everyone else. I loved playing cricket and I wasn’t interested in anything that might interfere with that. As for girls, when I was at school I suppose I was always a bit of a nerd in a way. We weren’t that well-off and I never had all the new fashions. Also, whatever my dad wore, I thought was cool. I guess I was an under-achiever on the social side.”

This is the credo of the outsider, and that sense of Watto as a liminal presence, despite his physical immensity, has carried over into his place within the national cricketing consciousness. Always wasting the review, a “cancer on the team”, Watto has never truly appeared to be a friend to many in the Australian dressing room.

Fidgety and watchful, Watson would have made a great Camusian anti-hero. Elsewhere in Watto he explains his reason for pursuing a career in cricket: “I wanted to do something so that people knew I existed.” Making it big in cricket was Watto’s answer to shooting the Arab on the beach. He could have been Australian cricket’s Meursault, a cult legend of affectless indifference and self-estrangement, a kind of Dougie Walters without the tinny and the smile. But to pull the act off, Watto would have had to stop caring. And Watto could never do apathy. The one thing everyone agrees on about Watto is that he cares – too much.

Watson, pictured in the slips with captain Michael Clarke and Steve Smith during the first Test in Cardiff. Photograph: Philip Brown/Reuters

When I was eight, and still dreaming of a career in the baggy green, I would burst into tears whenever I got out. Fortunately, I outgrow the habit by the age of 10. Watto, even at the age of 34, greets every dismissal as if still in the throes of that impending juvenile trauma. He bristles with purpose, but it’s a purpose with no team solidarity; his sporting will is entirely self-centred. This is no criticism. It only reinforces the sense of Watson, assertive but insular, as a richly textured character, his career so layered with missed chances, what-ifs, self-pity and regret, it should really be set to music – perhaps the swampy and disorienting exoticism of Brahms’s Double Concerto or the twilight zone yowl of David Bowie’s I’m Deranged.

But Watson is not alone, and that’s the point. Katich, MacGill, Hughes and many others have all walked this path before him – a path of lush neurosis and wistful melancholy. As the curtain comes down on this decade-long farce of food poisoning and back pain, the lingering image of Watson will be of the golden boy staring glumly from his tower, trapped in the prison of his own immaculate physique.

But in time we will see that this was a career fully lived, filled with volatility but somehow so densely predictable in its non-deviation from a mid-30s batting average. In time we will understand Watto not as a beautiful disaster but as the last and most beguiling of the baggy green brooders, these saturnine loners whose guiding athletic purpose has been to supply the minor mode to Australian cricket’s major scale, to live and play – thriving only some of the time – in the shadows on the other side of the mountain.

Good night, sweet Watto. We thought we loved you, once.