Malcolm Turnbull – Bulletproof Truth

Arise opener Steven Smith

“I don’t know what they’re thinking with ‘Smithy’ in the T20s.” – Michael Clarke on Sky Sports Radio.

Telford Vice / Cape Town

“PLEASE welcome Australia’s opening pair, Steven Smith and David Warner.” Several ifs and buts would have to be settled before that could become true, but it would be remiss not to raise the prospect as the Australians’ white-ball tour of South Africa looms. And not only because of the long, lingering shadow cast by Sandpapergate.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Smith has never opened the batting in his 358 international innings across the formats. But he will, selection chair George Bailey said on Tuesday, do so in the three T20Is against South Africa at Kingsmead on August 30 and September 1 and 3. Warner, who has taken guard at No. 1 or 2 in all but a dozen of his 438 trips to the crease for Australia, has been rested for the rubber. There is thus no chance of Smith and Warner opening the innings in the T20Is.

But both are in the squad for the five ODIs, which will be played in Bloemfontein and at Centurion and the Wanderers from September 7 to 17. As is Travis Head, who has opened in 18 of his last 22 ODI innings. Head scored 89 runs in three innings in India in March, but banked 240 in three games at home against England in November — 152 of them in a stand of 269 with Warner, who made 106, in the third match at the MCG.

Australian conditions are closer to South Africa’s than India’s, which adds to Head’s already decent argument to keep his place at the top of the order. But will that remain the case should Smith shoot the lights out in the T20I series? How could that not make him a candidate to open in the ODIs? Wouldn’t Australia want to have a look at him in the role before the World Cup in India in October and November?

Smith has, after all, batted only one place lower in 76 of his 126 ODI innings, among them his most recent 22. He has scored three centuries in those 22 games — after taking guard in the 28th, 23rd and fifth overs. In six more of those innings he has been summoned to the crease between the second and the sixth overs, and scored 53, 61, 76, 85, 94 and 98. So there can be no argument about his abilities facing the new ball.

Despite that making a case for Smith to open, especially in T20Is, would have been outlandish until January. Getting him into the XI seemed difficult enough. He has played in only 63 of Australia’s 150 T20Is from his first in February 2010. And for good reason: this is his least impressive format.

Only Joe Root has scored more Test runs than Smith’s total of 9,320 from the Australian’s debut in July 2010. He has 32 centuries in Tests and 12 in ODIs. His Test average is 58.61 — it topped 60 before a series in India in February — and 44.49 in ODIs.

But all he has to show after 51 T20I innings are four 50s. Of Australia’s 33 current players in the format 14 have higher strike rates than Smith’s 125.21. He was overlooked for four of Australia’s five matches at last year’s T20 World Cup. In 155 innings in other T20s before January he had scored one century — 101 off 54 at No. 3 for Rising Pune Supergiants against Gujarat Lions in Gahunje in the 2016 IPL, a tournament he hasn’t graced since 2021.

That Smith’s T20 fortunes were about to change didn’t seem apparent when he drove off the back foot and was caught at extra cover for 36 in the eighth over of a Big Bash League match at the SCG on January 15. But something had changed: Smith had opened the batting, with Josh Philippe, for the Sydney Sixers.

Two days later, against the Adelaide Strikers in Coffs Harbour, Philippe and Smith opened again. Smith hammered 101 off 56. Four days after that the same pair walked out at the start of a game against the Sydney Thunder at the SCG. Smith’s unbeaten 125 came off 66.

He followed that with 66 and 18 in away matches against the Hobart Hurricanes and the Perth Scorchers, but by then the narrative had shifted — after spending most of his international career as a meh T20 option Smith will come to South Africa having been given a platform to dismiss that perception.

“It was pretty exhilarating, [Smith’s] innings in the Big Bash, and I thought it highlighted the skill set he has and what he can do,” Bailey told reporters when he announced the squad. “The way he played, that’s something we want to see replicated internationally. So it’s important that he gets an opportunity to have a crack.”

Michael Clarke wasn’t convinced. “I don’t understand [Smith’s selection] … that to me is embarrassing for the selectors,” Clarke said on Sky Sports Radio on Tuesday. “They had him in the World Cup squad last year and he couldn’t make the XI. Selections over the past 15 months have been absolutely confusing. Smith not playing in that World Cup, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There’s just no accountability. It’s just swept under the carpet. I feel like I’m just watching a different game.

“I don’t know what they’re thinking with ‘Smithy’ in the T20s. I don’t think he’s playing any other T20 cricket around the world. He’s not getting a gig in the IPL, didn’t get picked up there. He must still want to play though.”

Maybe Clarke missed the Big Bash. Maybe he needed a hook on which to hang Bailey and his co-selectors, Andrew McDonald and Tony Dodemaide. Maybe Smith will make Clarke’s opinion look silly. Maybe not.

Nothing would be uncertain about the ire vented at Smith and Warner if, somehow, they do open in the ODIs in South Africa, where the crowds will never let them forget their central roles in the 2018 ball-tampering scandal. But the howls of outrage would ring with hypocrisy.

South Africa were done for ball-tampering three times between October 2013 and November 2016. In each instance the players concerned — Faf du Plessis twice, once while he was captain, and Vernon Philander — were defended by CSA. They were also largely supported by the public. So stones thrown, metaphorically, by South Africans at Smith and Warner would come from the front yard of a house made entirely of glass.

What happened in Australia in 2018 couldn’t have contrasted more starkly with South Africa’s embrace of their own ball-tamperers. Anger came down from on high in the shape of then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who weighed in hammily. Smith and Warner, then Australia’s captain and vice-captain, as well as the third stooge, Cameron Bancroft, were banned by CA and head coach Darren Lehmann resigned in tears.

The difference in the effect prompted by the identical cause made you wonder whether South Africa and Australia were on the same planet, nevermind in the same hemisphere. But let’s not let logic get in the way.

The crass crescendo would rise in South Africa’s stands despite Smith and Warner having already batted together in the country since Sandpapergate. They shared 50 for the second wicket in a T20I at St George’s Park and put on 26 in an ODI in Paarl, both in February 2020.

To be fair to the fans it’s one thing for Smith to join Warner in the middle after the fall of a wicket, quite another for them to stroll out together ordained to open the opera that is an innings.

Not that South Africans need prompting to take aim at Aussies. Many of them cannot understand the self-harming fuss made in Australia over the 2018 debacle. How, they ask, could Australians have been surprised when their team were exposed as cheats? The rest of the cricket world have held this to be self-evident for years.

So Smith and Warner opening in the ODIs in South Africa next month, admittedly a long shot, would stir old ugliness. But it could be worth the bother — and not only to hear what the Wanderers, where thoughts become words or approximations thereof unfiltered except through beer, thinks about that.

Cricbuzz

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Nothing lasts forever, even David Warner’s life ban

“The amendment would allow a person to request a penalty that they had accepted be reviewed after an appropriate period of time.” — Cricket Australia prepare for Warner’s return to leadership.

Telford Vice / Geelong, Victoria

NON-AUSTRALIAN cricket followers won’t be pleased to hear this, but they wouldn’t be surprised: David Warner, who was banned from leadership positions for the rest of his career for masterminding the ball-tampering disgrace that erupted in South Africa in 2018, could soon be granted the suits’ blessing to captain a team.

Cricket Australia’s board decided on Friday to change the organisation’s code of conduct to allow ongoing disciplinary sentences to be reviewed on appeal by an independent commissioner and, if deemed worthy, commuted.

“The amendment would allow a person to request a penalty that they had accepted be reviewed after an appropriate period of time,” a CA statement said. “Currently the code states that once a charge and penalty is accepted, there is no avenue for review. The onus would be on the applicant to prove they had undergone genuine reform relevant to the offence they were sanctioned for.

“Any review would not revisit the original sanction, other than suspension of a penalty in recognition of genuine reform. The board has requested that the CA head of integrity propose an amendment to the code for consideration. It was agreed that should an amendment in respect to long-term sanctions be adopted, any review of a penalty would be heard by an independent code of conduct commission.”

Warner is the only Australia player serving a life ban. He is less than five years into that sentence, but he could be back in charge of a side before Christmas: Cricket New South Wales asked CA to reconsider Warner’s case because the Sydney Thunder are in the market for a stand-in captain for the BBL that starts on December 13.

Aaron Finch, who retired from ODIs last month and turns 36 next month, has led Australia in 128 white-ball games and is clearly reaching the end of his career. He and Test captain Pat Cummins have voiced their support for Warner’s return to formal leadership — he was appointed as Smith’s Test and ODI vice-captain in August 2015 and was at the helm in a dozen ODIs and T20Is from 2016 and 2018 — and nevermind that Warner is three weeks older than Finch.

CA will thus have to live with non-Australians thinking the decision to revisit Warner’s starring role in Sandpapergate reeks of expediency. Now that Australian cricket needs him in a managerial capacity, he’s OK. From polecat to prodigal son. No further questions, your honour.

That’s a sweeping u-turn from 2018, when CA decided after an investigation that Warner had misled poor, innocent Cameron Bancroft into using sandpaper to roughen the ball and that Warner had dominated poor, gormless Smith into allowing that to happen. The plot was discovered by broadcasters SuperSport — otherwise known as South Africa’s 12th-man — during the Newlands Test in March 2018.

How long the Australians had deployed their dark art by then is not known. All three players lied about their cheating under mounting pressure, some of which came from the highest office in the land. Malcolm Turnbull, then Australia’s prime minister, said he was “shocked and bitterly disappointed” and demanded Smith’s removal as captain. Sandpapergate duly cost Smith and Warner their positions, and Darren Lehmann his job as coach. James Sutherland would have wanted a better farewell to his 17 years as CA’s chief executive than this mess. CA chair David Peever and board member Mark Taylor resigned.

Smith and Warner were banned from playing for a year and Bancroft for nine months. Smith was precluded from captaining for an additional year after he had served his suspension. Warner wasn’t afforded any such favour. South Africans looking on at the time were caught between schadenfreude at their bitter rivals being torn apart from within and bemusement that Australians could take the matter so seriously.

Faf du Plessis and Vernon Philander had been caught in the same ball-tampering act three times in the previous five years, and not once did Cricket South Africa take action against them. They left that to the ICC, who banned Smith for the last match of the 2018 series, merely fined Bancroft, and didn’t even charge Warner. Besides, it wasn’t as if Aussies had a reputation for fair play: Warner himself had behaved abominably on the field and off in the first Test of the 2018 series at Kingsmead, where he had to be restrained from physically confronting Quinton de Kock in a stairwell after submitting the South African to a sustained verbal attack while he was batting.

Might the vocal stance Warner took in the players’ protracted salary dispute with CA in 2017 have been a factor in the special treatment meted out to him by his home board seven months after agreement on salaries had been reached? Might the fact that he will play in the BBL for the first time since 2013, and the star quality he will lend the tournament, have helped manufacture his seeming redemption? Either way, there will be cynical smiles at the impending completion of Warner’s rehabilitation. Where, the smilers will ask, was the support for him in 2018 from Cummins — who was also part of the Newlands Test XI — and Finch, who by then had led Australia 11 times.

Gideon Haigh, Australia’s bard of bat and ball, addressed the issue in this weekend’s edition of The Australian: “It is anomalous and disproportionate in a world that pardons and winks at so much to impose a lifetime sentence for anything. It is holding cricketers to higher standards than public officials; it is mindless obstinacy to insist on the continuation of anything because it has been decided once. Justice needs to be tempered by mercy.”

There was little mercy for Warner to be seen, heard nor read in 2018. There was mostly loathing, in the press and seemingly everywhere else including the prime minister’s office, and shattered silence from within the dressing room. As for the problem of sticking to decisions made just the once, good luck telling an umpire — after you choose to bat and your team are bowled out for 47 — that the toss should be taken again and the game restarted.

Not that South Africans have a square centimetre of moral high ground to claim. They squandered it all in the way some of them reacted to Warner’s altercation with De Kock in Durban. To stoop to taking to the stands at St George’s Park wearing masks made from photographs of the face of Warner’s wife was the lowest point of shame and cowardice reached in this saga. Worse, most of their compatriots didn’t deplore their behaviour.

Of course, that didn’t stop dark chuckling in November last year when Tim Paine, who had emerged as a seeming beacon of decency, a rare and shining unugly Aussie, after taking over the captaincy from Smith from the last Test at the Wanderers in 2018, was undone by a sex scandal.
But that would be dangerously short-sighted. Because, even in a world as strewn with stats as cricket, sleaze and scandal don’t keep a scorecard for long. Just ask David Warner.

First published by Cricbuzz.

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Aussies go home, but first a beer

“We have to improve our behaviour in the way we play the game.” – Tim Paine

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

AFTER more than a month in South Africa playing a Test series that in important ways was more taxing than even the Ashes, Australia would have been forgiven for looking forward to going home.

Instead, after everything that’s happened they might want to head for Mauritius or the Seychelles.

Or anywhere but Melbourne or Sydney, or other places where they will encounter Australians asking them what had gone so badly wrong.

But their captain, Tim Paine, is ready for exactly that: “We’ve maybe had our head in the sand a little bit over the last 12 months [thinking] if we continue to win we can kind of act and behave how we like and the Australian public will be OK with that.

“What we’ve probably found out in the past month or so is that the Australian public and our fans don’t necessarily like the way we go about it.

“It’s pretty simple — we have to listen.

“We have to take it on board and we have to improve our behaviour in the way we play the game.”

And not only because Australia relinquished the lead in a rubber they ended up losing 3-1.

“At the moment there is a fair bit of disappointment and borderline embarrassment in the dressingroom,” Paine said.

He spoke at the Wanderers shortly before noon on Tuesday, minutes after his team had been thrashed by 492 runs in the fourth Test.

That was the fourth-biggest win, in terms of runs, in Test history and it sealed South Africa’s first series win over the Aussies in this country in 48 years.

To think Australia had arrived boasting the world’s No. 1 ranked batsman who was also their captain, a quality attack, and a hard-nosed coach. They leave in tatters.

Steve Smith has been relieved of the captaincy and banned for a year for his part in the ball-tampering scandal that exploded during the third Test at Newlands and escalated into a super nova of outrage.

Mitchell Starc, the leader of the attack, will be out for months with a stress fracture of the tibia.

Darren Lehmann, a man of gruff, forthright confidence, was reduced to tears when he announced that the Wanderers Test would be his last as coach, also because of the ball-tampering disaster.

But the biggest difference between the side who arrived in South Africa and the one leaving is David Warner, who got off the plane as vice-captain and has, like Smith, been banished.

Warner was the mastermind behind the ball-tampering plot that cost him, Smith and Cameron Bancroft their places in the team and turned them into, officially and indelibly, cheats.

He is the embodiment of the uncompromising, often unfair style of play Australia have championed for too long.

Now, with everybody including the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, questioning a previously vaunted team culture, the Warner way leads straight out of the door.

“We have to find the fine line between being really respectful of the opposition and the game and also being at a level that is really competitive, as you should be in Test match cricket,” Paine said.

“It’s going to be a different style to what a lot of the guys are used to but once the new coach comes in and has his say we will go to it straightaway.”

Australia have been the ugliest team in cricket for decades, although with Warner not in their midst at the Wanderers they did soften to a degree that even Dean Elgar found “odd”.

The crusty opening batsman no doubt asking a few pointed questions about that after the Aussies knocked on South Africa’s dressingroom door on Tuesday.

“We’ve been invited in in the next half an hour, actually,” Paine said. “It’s an early beer, that’s for sure; it might be a coffee, but we’ll go next door.

“We’ve got some young players in our team who will learn a lot from going to have a beer with some of the experienced players that the South Africans have got, so we’d be foolish not to take that opportunity.”

After the Newlands Test, South Africa coach Ottis Gibson bemoaned the fact that the teams had not yet shared a drink — as they had after every match of India’s tour earlier in the summer.

That done, Paine said he and his team would look forward to “a clean slate”.

“It’s an exciting time. We’ll have a new coach, a new brand or culture or whatever you want to call it and guys are going to have a chance to have an input into that.

“As well as with the guys being out at the moment there are opportunities for guys to step up during that period of Test cricket.

“It will be good to get home, have a rest and think about it.”

And there’s plenty for the Aussies to think about.

Like, if South Africans ask you over for a beer, whatever time it is they sure as hell don’t mean coffee.

Faf and Steve, and the ‘bizarre, crazy, ridiculous’ games they play

Right now it’s no fun being Steven Peter Devereux Smith.

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

FAF du Plessis knows just how Steve Smith feels. Except that he doesn’t.

“It’s difficult for me to give an answer which I think is right,” Du Plessis said on Sunday. “It’s so difficult to say which is right and which is wrong.

“Obviously he is trying to take responsibility, so there is right in that. There is also right in holding other people responsible for their own actions.

“I can understand it’s a really tough time for him to be in now. The situation I was in was really difficult for me because people were attacking me, my personality and my character, and I felt it was wrong, it wasn’t fair.

“I don’t know how he feels but I imagine it is a really tough time.”

When Du Plessis was done for ball-tampering in Australia in November 2016, he felt like his world was ending.

Smith, who admitted to being party to the same offence during the third test at Newlands on Saturday, no doubt feels that way now.

But Du Plessis’ offence never caught the attention of Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president at the time.

The trouble Smith is in increased exponentially on Sunday, when Australia prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighed in, telling the Melbourne Age: “It seemed completely beyond belief that the Australian cricket team had been involved in cheating.”

The story burst its banks further on Sunday when a reporter in the Newlands pressbox was commissioned to write the front page lead in Monday’s edition of the Indian Express.

The Rajasthan Royals are set to pay Smith more than R8-million to play for and captain them in this year’s Indian Premier League.

Whether that will happen is to be decided by the Board of Control for Cricket India, but the franchise have already made plain their “zero tolerance policy” for bringing cricket into disrepute.

Whichever way you look at it, right now it’s no fun being Steven Peter Devereux Smith.

“When I was in Australia it felt like the same intensity,” Du Plessis said when he was asked to compare the two sagas.

“I was being followed everywhere I went. The media looked the same as it does now.

“But there are probably bigger organisations and people that want to get involved.

“I think it’s unfair for me to comment on what they think.

“My situation, I feel, was a little bit different than this.”

Du Plessis maintains he was merely using saliva to shine the ball during the second test in Hobart, where television cameras spotted a mint in his mouth.

Using saliva is allowed, but the mint that was melting into that saliva meant a foreign substance was being applied to the ball — which is not allowed.

Even so, Du Plessis insisted Smith’s crime, which was to be involved in a plan for Cameron Bancroft to scuff up the ball using sticking tape loaded with sand from the pitch, was worse.

“Ball-shining versus ball-tampering is two different situations, and one is more serious than the other,” Du Plessis said.

Smith, test cricket’s No. 1-ranked batsman, should have captained Australia in the fourth test at the Wanderers, which starts on Friday. But he has been banned for the match and seems certain to lose the leadership permanently.

“It’s almost like losing two players in one because he’s such a strong batsman,” Du Plessis said. “I also feel his leadership is good for the team so he’ll be a big loss for them.”

The scandal is but the latest twist in a series plot that seems to have been scripted by drug-addled film students.

In little more than a dozen days of cricket, we’ve seen two altercations on staircases, an on-field shoulder charge, spectators ejected for poor behaviour, a player dropping the ball on another — how quaint, given everything else — and now this.

Six players have been on the match referee’s carpet, while Smith was charged by the head honcho himself: International Cricket Council chief executive Dave Richardson.

“It’s been bizarre, crazy, ridiculous,” Du Plessis said. “We joke about it but it’s like a soap opera.

“There’s something happening every day. The two captains have both said it is a shame because this has been an incredible series between two strong teams.

“Apart from [Sunday], it has been a very evenly matched series, amazing to watch.

“But there are way too many things happening away from the game that are taking the shine off.”

Ah yes, Sunday — when South Africa took all 10 of Australia’s wickets to win the third test by 322 runs to take a 2-1 lead in the series.

And so to the Wanderers …

It’s dark in Tim Paine’s alley

TMG Digital

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

IF he didn’t know it already Tim Paine discovered at the weekend that life isn’t fair.

He crossed the boundary at Newlands on Saturday morning as the wicketkeeper of an Australia team who were the sporting pride of their nation.

By the time he stepped back across the ropes at stumps he was a member of a gang of ball-tampering cheats who the target furious abuse being heaved from thousands of kilometres and several time zones away.

By Sunday morning he was the captain of that cursed team.

By the evening of Sunday, bloody Sunday he was explaining to the gathered press the how and why of his sorry bunch of shellshocked, ball-tampering cheats managing to lose all 10 wickets for 57 runs in 19.4 overs and 99 minutes to South Africa, who won the third test by 322 runs with a day to spare.

“It was extremely difficult,” Paine, who was made captain for the rest of the Newlands test on Sunday morning after Steve Smith and his deputy, David Warner, stood down from their positions in the wake of Australia’s admissions of ball-tampering on Saturday.

“That’s certainly no excuse for what you saw in the last 45 minutes [of the match].

“We’re still the Australian cricket team and we’re expected to put up a bit better effort than we did today.

“But it was in some really trying circumstances and probably circumstances that we brought on ourselves.”

“It’s been a horrible 24 hours. We’re struggling. Probably the reality and the enormity of what happened is starting to sink in.”

Being hammered in, more like, by a tsunami of criticism from home led by no less than Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

“It seemed completely beyond belief that the Australian cricket team had been involved in cheating,” Turnbull told the Melbourne Age.

“After all our cricketers are role models and cricket is synonymous with fair play.

“How can our team be engaged in cheating like this?

“It beggars belief.”

Did the players foresee that level of outrage?

“Maybe some did,” Paine said. “I don’t think all would have expected this to be as big as it has been, particularly the fallout that we’ve seen from back home.”

Notwithstanding the fact that the Australians have caused their own problems, there’s cruelty in the series resuming at the Wanderers on Friday.

“Going forward we can try and control how we are seen by the Australian public, become the team we want to become and they want us to be seen as,” Paine said.

No-one can yet say who will lead Australia at the Wanderers. Smith has been banned for the match by the International Cricket Council, and Warner could be suspended on the grounds of what is revealed by the investigation Cricket Australia are urgently mounting.

Paine, a seemingly decent man, could keep a job he and many other Australians would ordinarily covet.

But these are extraordinary times.

“Strange,” was how he said it felt to be Australia’s captain.

“Not the circumstances that anyone would like to be sitting here, that’s for sure.

“But, yeah, a really bizarre, strange, horrible 24 hours.”

Hang in there, fella. There’s more to come.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie … Ugly, Ugly, Ugly

Spectators who had previously waved Australian flags removed them and brandished naked flag sticks instead.

The Indian Express

TELFORD VICE at Newlands

DISMISSING AB de Villiers normally triggers giddy celebrations by the fielding team, and if the match is in South Africa — or, during the IPL, in Bangalore — a trough of disappointment sinks into the stands.

But when de Villiers danced down the pitch to Josh Hazlewood 45 minutes after the start on the fourth day of the third Test at Newlands on Sunday and steered a juicy edge to first slip, it was as if a traffic signal on nearby Campground Road had changed from red to green. Nothing more.

The Australians offered each other limp, perfunctory high fives and the spectators’ minds seemed somewhere else.

That they were — on the confession made by Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft after Saturday’s play that the latter had tampered with the ball on the instructions of the former and others in what Smith terms the “leadership group”.

Specifically, Bancroft had covered the sticky side of a piece of tape with sand from the pitch and rubbed it on the rougher side of the ball.

When questioned by the umpires, he took the tape from his pocket, slipped it into his underwear, and pretended all he had in his pocket was a soft fabric pouch used to carry sunglasses.

By Sunday morning, Australian time, the saga had exploded beyond all cricket’s boundaries.

Even Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull weighed in, albeit with a statement that will be met with incredulous laughter by anyone who has been up close and personal with an Aussie team.

“It seemed completely beyond belief that the Australian cricket team had been involved in cheating,” Turnbull was quoted as saying by the Melbourne Age.

“After all our cricketers are role models and cricket is synonymous with fair play.

“How can our team be engaged in cheating like this?

“It beggars belief.”

After lunch on Sunday came news from the International Cricket Council (ICC) that Smith had been fined his whole match fee and banned for the fourth Test at the Wanderers next Friday, and that Bancroft had lost 75% of his fee and been hit with three demerit points, one short of a ban.

“The decision made by the leadership group of the Australian team to act in this way is clearly contrary to the spirit of the game, risks causing significant damage to the integrity of the match, the players and the sport itself and is therefore ‘serious’ in nature,” ICC chief executive David Richardson said.

“As captain, Steve Smith must take full responsibility for the actions of his players and it is appropriate that he be suspended.”

Bancroft is 25 and playing in only his eighth Test, factors that seem to have saved him from harsher punishment.

“To carry a foreign object on to the field of play with the intention of changing the condition of the ball to gain an unfair advantage over your opponent is against not only the laws, but the spirit of the game as well,” match referee Andy Pycroft said.

“That said, I acknowledge that Cameron has accepted responsibility for his actions by pleading guilty to the charge and apologising publicly.

“As a young player starting out in international cricket I hope the lessons learned from this episode will strongly influence the way he plays the game during the rest of his career.”

Smith stood down as captain for the rest of the Newlands match before the start of Sunday’s play. Wicketkeeper Tim Paine’s 12th Test is now also his first as a captain.

David Warner relinquished the vice-captaincy until the Wanderers Test, but how he escaped being rapped by the ICC, to quote Turnbull, “beggars belief”.

If Warner wasn’t part of the “leadership group” Smith blamed for this mess, who was? Not coach Darren Lehmann, Smith said. Really?

To their credit, Smith and Bancroft appeared sincerely contrite at an intense press conference on Saturday evening.

“My integrity, the team’s integrity, the leadership group’s integrity has come into question and rightfully so,” Smith said.

“It’s certainly not on and it won’t happen again, I can promise you that, under my leadership.

“I’m embarrassed. I know the boys in the sheds are embarrassed as well.

“It’s not what we want to see in the game. It’s not what the Australian cricket team’s about.”

As Smith spoke, Bancroft stared balefully into a faraway abyss.

“I want to be here because I’m accountable for my actions as well,” Bancroft said.

“I’ve got to live with the consequences and the damage to my own reputation that that comes with.”

Cricket Australia are mounting an investigation, but Smith’s future as Australia’s captain seems less certain by the hour. Likewise whether Bancroft has a Test career left.

When Bancroft and Warner emerged to open the batting in the second innings on Sunday they were met with the kind of angry yowling more often heard from the bloodthirsty crowd at Newlands rugby stadium a stone’s throw away.

Spectators who had previously waved Australian flags removed them and brandished naked flag sticks instead.

The noise rose to a crescendo when Warner was dismissed and passed Smith on his way to the crease.

The reaction from Australia itself was as aggressive as these Australians have been in a series that has stunk with acrimony and hypocrisy.

Nothing is as ugly as the ugliness that spews from one Aussie to another.

The nation has spoken: heads must role.

On Sunday, wickets did. All 10 of Australia’s for 57 runs in 99 minutes as South Africa surged to victory by 322 runs with a day to spare — a day that will be as dark for the Aussies as it will be bright for South Africa, who have not beaten them in a home series since 1970.