Footy season is over and cricket is about to regain its place at the top of the pecking order. With India visiting for four Tests and South Africa and Sri Lanka visiting for one-day matches, the lead-up to February's World Cup is sure to be action-packed. Before that all starts, Andrew Wu takes a look at the 10 biggest things to have happened in cricket during the Australian winter.

1. Regaining No.1 Test ranking

A year after being humiliated 4-0 in India, Australia returned to the top of world cricket in May, though their stay was only brief.

Australia's reclaiming of the No.1 ranking came after a dream summer that yielded a 5-0 hammering of England followed by a 2-1 series victory against South Africa, though a technicality in how ratings are calculated also played its part.

Points from the 2010-11 season, when Australia lost 3-1 to England and 2-0 in India, became redundant with results from 2012 and 2013 losing half their weighting.

The Australians dropped back to No.2 by the end of July, but victory in the Middle East against Pakistan will return them to the summit.

2.Twenty20 flops

Five-day champs but Twenty20 chumps. Despite Australians boasting some of the fattest pay cheques from the Indian Premier League, the national team again flopped at the World Twenty20, this time failing to pass the group stage.

With a specialised team containing a 43-year-old, Brad Hogg, and a rising 40-year-old, Brad Hodge, Australia's hopes of winning a maiden Twenty20 world title evaporated after losing their first three games of the tournament. Their only win came against Bangladesh.

Australia now has a new Twenty20 captain after George Bailey stepped aside, replaced by limited-overs specialist Aaron Finch.

3. Southern Stars

Not for the first time Australia's women's team, the Southern Stars, showed its male colleagues how it was done on the Twenty20 world stage.

The Australians thrashed England by six wickets with 29 balls to spare to capture their third consecutive world title.

They were brilliantly led by Meg Lanning, who made a bold statement in Australia's run chase when she clubbed the player of the tournament, Anya Shrubsole, over her head for six.

With arguably the most professional set-up in the women's game, the Southern Stars will again be hard to beat in India in 2016.

4. Clarke's injury woes

Australia's Test captain finished the South African tour a battered and bruised hero and after a six-month hiatus was back in the wars in his comeback game.

Worryingly, it was Michael Clarke's dodgy hamstrings that troubled him, again raising doubts about the 33-year-old's long-term future, though Cricket Australia does not believe his injuries are career-threatening.

Clarke's persistent injury problems, however, may force him to make a call on his one-day international future after next year's World Cup in order to prolong his Test career.

He remains clearly Australia's most accomplished batsman on the Test stage.

5. Stability at the top

As hard as it may have been to believe in June last year, it is now steady as she goes for Australian cricket.

CA chief executive James Sutherland survived one of the most tumultuous periods in Australian cricket in 30 years to be given an unlimited tenure by the board.

John Inverarity stepped aside as chairman of selectors but was replaced by his right-hand man Rod Marsh, who signed a three-year deal this year, and on Friday Darren Lehmann was locked away until the end of June 2017.

This follows the dramas from 2011 when Ricky Ponting, Andrew Hilditch and Tim Nielsen all stepped down from their posts in the space of months.

6. Losing to Zimbabwe

Australia may be the World Cup favourites and No.1 in the ODI arena but that did not stop them being toppled by lowly Zimbabwe two months ago.

The unfancied Zimbabweans won by three wickets with two overs remaining, their first win over Australia in 31 years, but the margin would have been far greater if not for Clarke's unbeaten 68, which he made on one leg.

Yet again, Australia's frailties against spin were exposed, though it should be alarming that it was the unfamiliar names of John Nyumbu, Prosper Utseya, Sean Williams and Malcolm Waller who strangled them.

It's just as well for Clarke's men next year's World Cup will be on the fast and bouncy pitches of home.

7. Kevin Pietersen

The red faces Australia had after losing to Zimbabwe are nothing compared to the damage Kevin Pietersen's tell-all autobiography has inflicted on English cricket.

After being kicked out of the England team, Pietersen skewered seemingly everyone who he felt had wronged him.

Former coach Andy Flower was labelled a "Mood Hoover" who was "contagiously sour" and "infectiously dour". "He could walk into a room and suck all the joy out of it in five seconds," Pietersen wrote.

Current coach Peter Moores was criticised for an inability to "chill". "He's a nice guy but like a human triple espresso - so intense," Pietersen wrote.

Matt Prior was "The Big Cheese [who] had matured and grown too large for his little box", Stuart Broad was not the sharpest tool in the box while captain Alastair Cook was labelled a "company man".

8. Chucking

After being accused of not doing enough on the issue, the ICC has, in recent months, cracked down on players it deems to have suspect actions.

Pakistan's Saeed Ajmal has been the biggest name to be banned from international cricket after failing tests but Sri Lanka's Sachithra Senanayake, New Zealand's Kane Williamson, Zimbabwe's Prosper Utseya and Bangladesh's Sohag Gazi have all had the book thrown at them.

West Indies spin wizard Sunil Narine and Pakistan's Mohammad Hafeez were among those reported for suspect actions during the Champions League Twenty20.

Australia have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the crackdown. They do not have any new-age spin bowlers and their batsmen have long struggled playing it.

9. The Big Three

At boardroom level, there was widespread criticism of the move by the boards of India, Australia and England to take control of the International Cricket Council.

Whereas previously all 10 Test-playing nations sat on the ICC's executive board, that has been replaced by a new committee of five, of which India, Australia and England hold permanent seats.

Critics slammed the plan as it would enable The Big Three, as they came to be known, a greater slice of the earnings from matches at the cost of smaller Associate and Affiliate nations.

There were even threats India, which generates the lion's share of revenue in the game, would pull out of ICC events if its wishes were not met.

There are also concerns that India's Narayanaswami Srinivasan has been allowed to chair the ICC despite not being able to lead his own country's board due to investigations into allegations he is linked to match fixing in the IPL.

10. Match fixing

"My name is Lou Vincent, and I am a cheat." They may well be the words etched on former New Zealand international Lou Vincent's cricket gravestone after he was banned for life from the sport by the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Vincent pleaded guilty to 18 breaches of the ECB's anti-corruption code for offences in three domestic Twenty20 games in 2008 and 2011 then issued a public apology which he distributed to the New Zealand media.

Vincent is among a list of former New Zealand internationals likely to be called to give evidence next year in Chris Cairns' perjury hearing in Britain.

The charge arises from a libel trial in 2012 against former IPL boss Lalit Modi, who was ordered to pay Cairns 90,000 pounds in damages after failing to prove the former NZ star was involved in match fixing.