The departure of the 22-year-old Canadian from the first of this season’s Grand Slam tournaments meant that, as my friend Rob Maul has noted in The Sun, all 12 players who featured in the first five episodes of the new tennis documentary Break Point are out of contention in Melbourne, either through injury or defeat.

Matteo Berrettini was beaten in the men’s first round by Britain’s renascent, metal-hipped 35-year-old Andy Murray; the second round put paid to second seed Casper Ruud, of Norway, the United States' Taylor Fritz and Australia's Thanosi Kokkinakis, the latter also being beaten by Murray…

Hang on. Is this a Murray thing?

No. But he has certainly played his part in it. Moving on…

The third round meant goodbye for America's Frances Tiafoe.

In the women’s event, Poland’s world number one 1 Iga Świątek also made an unexpected departure in the fourth round. She had been preceded to the exit by second seed Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, who went out in the second round, and then by sixth seed Maria Sakkori, of Greece, in the third round.

As for Paula Badosa of Spain and home players Ajla Tomljanovic and Wimbledon runner-up Nick Kyrgios, late injuries prevented them from taking part.

Clearly, it’s the "Curse of Netflix".

Additional evidence for this phenomenon was readily available as the Czech player who beat Auger-Aliassime 4-6, 6-3, 7-6, 7-6, the Czech Republic's Jiri Lehecka, had never won a grand slam main-draw match before this year.

QED.

As for how many there are in sport who do believe in such things - well, they are legion. As are stories of similar jinxes.

One of the most significant jinx stories to have played out in recent years was that involving the Argentina football team - the "Curse of Tilcara".

The story was that, while preparing for the 1986 World Cup finals in the thin air of Mexico, the squad trained at altitude back home near the small town of Tilcara and paid a visit there to the statue of the Virgin of Copacabana asking for a blessing and promising that, if they won the World Cup that year, they would return to thank her.

They duly won, but the promise was not fulfilled, and in the intervening years Argentina never won the trophy again - albeit they came close by reaching the 2014 final. The 1986 team’s head coach, Carlos Bilardo, denied the Tilcara visit story, but locals insisted on its truth.

After members of the 1986 squad, as it were by popular request, were reported to have re-visited the town to make amends the fortunes of the national team were transformed as they won the 2021 Copa America, the 2022 Finalissima and, last month in Qatar, the FIFA World Cup.

As jinxes go, that’s a big one. Depending on whether you believe Bilardo or not.

And that’s the thing with so many recorded sporting jinxes - they are often a matter of dispute, of one party’s word against another, of, perhaps, coincidence or sheer chance.

Australian football has a similar story in which its team played a key 1970 World Cup qualifier against Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - in Mozambique, enlisting beforehand the help of a local witch doctor who buried bones near the goalposts and cursed the opposition.

But when they were unable to come up with the fee demanded they found that the curse had been turned on them, and a subsequent defeat by Israel meant they didn’t qualify. That run of World Cup bad luck went on for more than 30 years before the curse was apparently lifted in 2004 when John Safran, as part of his TV series John Safran v God, travelled to Mozambique and hired a witch doctor to work further magic.

The Socceroos have since qualified for the 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

The jinx took a hit in 1974, however, when Australia did reach the World Cup finals in Germany after a heroic qualification campaign culminating in the Jimmy Mackay, uncle of insidethegames' editor Duncan Mackay, scoring the winning goal in a playoff against South Korea.

But Australia failed to score in any of their opening round matches in West Germany and were eliminated.

Among the myriad of reports of sporting jinxes, truth is often the first victim.

But some are indisputable.

Nobody questions the fact that, in 1971, the Leeds United manager Don Revie invited a fortune teller, Gypsy Rose Lee, to visit Elland Road after a particularly excruciating run of results.

He believed that a group of travellers had laid a curse on the ground after being moved off the site so that it could be built in the 1890s.

According to various accounts, the visitor from Blackpool walked onto the pitch, scratched the grass and threw some seeds down. She then walked to all four corners of the pitch and did the same, before telling Revie, over a cup of tea, that the curse had been lifted.

The following year Leeds defeated their arch-rivals Arsenal in the FA Cup final.

Then again, the year after, they lost in the final to Second Division Sunderland…

I can personally vouch for at least one jinx which occurred at the 2011 World Athletics Championships in Daegu as those featuring on the front cover of the daily programme suffered misfortunes or failures.

By day eight the initial joke about a "hoodoo" had hardened into certainty as a sequence of star turns had failed to deliver.

Australia’s defending pole vault champion Steve Hooker had exited without completing a successful jump in the opening day’s qualifying, while on day two, calamitously, the world champion and record holder Usain Bolt was disqualified from the 100 metres final for false-starting.

On day three, Cuba's Dayron Robles was stripped of gold for bumping an opponent in the 110m hurdles and on day four world record holder Yelena Isinbayeva of Russia failed even to win a medal in the women’s pole vault.

Day five’s featured athlete, Russia’s Olga Kaniskina, had bucked the trend in winning the women’s 20km road race, but when Sally Pearson was the front-cover photo of choice three days later, there had still not been a featured track and field athlete who had managed to live up to their billing.

In exactly 12.28sec that changed as the Australian 100m hurdler claimed a first global gold.

Her immediate reaction was to hare over to the barriers. She needed to grab a copy of the daily programme with her face on the front cover so that she could brandish it at the cameras.