The best since Bradman.

The public face of a disgraced culture within Australian cricket.

Steve Smith is today, arguably, both of these things.

What was building as potentially one of the greatest careers in the game has been derailed by a senseless act of self-harm.

And a failure to adequately come clean in its immediate aftermath.

When Smith, along with a "leadership group" he presides over — which turned out to be nothing more than himself and vice-captain David Warner — hatched a ham-fisted plan to tamper with the ball over lunch on the third day of a Test match, his moral authority to lead was left in tatters.

Once the Australian public made clear their disgust over his actions he simply had to go.

The now former Australian captain has been suspended for 12 months from all international and domestic cricket after his incredible decision to sanction blatant cheating.

The door has been left open for him to return to the team and, remarkably, even to the captaincy a year after returning to the game, should he earn it. That offer is a nod to his previous good character.

No such concession was offered Warner, who also has been banished for a year.

The vision of Cameron Bancroft, the junior member of the team co-opted into undertaking the illicit act, nervously stuffing a piece sandpaper in to his pants on realising he had been found out, will follow him the rest of his career.

Bancroft, whose own nine-month ban reflects his status as a patsy in the plan, as well as his callow status in the team, may never play for Australia again.

A young man forever tainted by his misguided willingness to be a team player.

For Smith, who along with Bancroft offered misdirection at his mea culpa — where tape rather than sandpaper was detailed as their tool of deception — the personal cost is greater still.

Even aside from the millions he will lose from having his IPL contract cancelled.

The totem of the Australian team for the past few years is now an emblem for all that is wrong with sport's toxic win-at-all-costs mentality.

He is a cheat. A plain, self-confessed fact that no magnitude of runs and match-winning performances can ever whitewash from his record.

A quintessential sporting hero

Until the events in Cape Town, Smith appeared the quintessential Australian sporting hero.

Steve Smith made his debut in 2010, but only established himself in the Test team from 2013. ( AAP: Dave Hunt )

Young and fresh faced, prodigiously talented, with an unbending work ethic and will to win. A role model. A champion.

Those comparisons with Don Bradman were being made as recently as two months ago, such was his extraordinary record over the past few years.

Smith had just captained his first home Ashes series where he had single-handedly won matches and batted the English into submission.

The tone was set in Brisbane during the first Test.

An unbeaten 141 on day three neutered a surprisingly strong opening salvo from the tourists. The century ball was celebrated with a guttural roar, wild eyes and an almost primal banging of his chest.

The game was turned. The destiny of the match and series thus dictated. This was a man operating on a different level to the rest.

"You can just tell he's hungry to lead his team well and he wants to be the best player that there has ever been," Ricky Ponting, the previous Australian batsman to be talked of as getting close to The Don, said.

Ponting was captain when Smith made his Test debut in 2010 and remembered that even then his work ethic and class were evident.

"We all knew he had talent, because he used to do things a bit differently. He would go to the nets and [you] throw him a pull shot, and he'd hit it straight back at you almost like a tennis shot.

"It's all different and unorthodox, but there's a certain amount of talent that goes with that."

Smith's century at the Gabba, the slowest of his Test career, was the perfect mix of obduracy and grace as he battled for hour after hour.

It was the sort of innings, Ponting said, that defined great captains.

"[If I was in the change room] I would have been inspired by what I had seen in 520 minutes at the crease … playing a role that was so specific to what the game needed," he said.

"It was a leader's innings, and he's put his mark on the series at the first possible opportunity."

By the end of the five matches, the series won 4-0, he had hit three centuries and compiled 687 runs at an average of 137.40.

He was officially the world's best batsman, with an aura of invincibility around him.

He was the very best of us. A representation of national pride through sporting achievement.

No more.

A career built on hard work

The cricketing journey for Steven Peter Devereux Smith began, as it does for most, in his childhood backyard. But also the garage of his father, Peter.

Could Steve Smith be closer to The Don than we might think? ( Supplied/AP )

A ball tied to a string hanging six inches off the floor was Smith's version of Bradman's golf ball and water tank.

Endless hours spent honing his eye striking it against the ceiling and again on its return in the southern Sydney suburb of Alford Point.

The hours of youthful commitment trained Smith's natural athletic talent — he was also an excellent tennis player — and he moved into the NSW system with the prediction he would have a long career ahead of him.

After making his debut for the Blues at 18, he made his first Test appearance just two years later against Pakistan, at Lord's.

Back then he was selected as a leg-spinner, batting at eight, though a first-class average of over 50 offered a clue as to the direction he was heading.

"I think he has got that X factor about him," Shane Warne, who worked with Smith when he was coming through the bowling ranks in NSW, said at the time.

"He could be something pretty special."

A moderate contribution as an all-rounder to the 2010-11 Ashes series preceded a couple of years away from the international stage.

He tightened up his game and returned to the Test team, ironically perhaps, thanks to another — and now farcically benign looking — scandal to hit the national team.

A member of the touring party in India in 2013, "homeworkgate" — a petty squabble over coach Micky Arthur's demands for players to write up a report on their games that went in part ignored — saw four players dropped and Smith selected.

His 92 in a losing match in his first knock on the subcontinent was a taste of things to come.

He plundered his first Test century later that year at the Oval in a 3-0 Ashes series defeat and he got two more in the 5-0 revenge whitewash six months later, and was by then an established part of the team.

A young captain continues to rise

The confirmation of his special talent came in the summer of 2014-15 when in four successive first innings in home Tests against India, Smith went past three figures.

Steve Smith helped Australia reclaim the Ashes in 2013, and was only years later brought in as captain. ( AAP: Dave Hunt )

When captain Michael Clarke was injured, Cricket Australia turned to Smith rather than vice-captain Brad Haddin to fill in, and he was fitted with a jacket embroidered with the number 45— his place in the list of Australian captains.

Just 25 when he first led the national side, the extra responsibility seemed to inspire rather than impede him, and his average has soared to well above 70 since taking charge.

Once Clarke retired at the end of the 2015 Ashes, Smith was confirmed as the full-time skipper.

He had become Australia's most important batsman and cemented this by being Australia's leading run scorer in the 2015 World Cup win.

Leading by example, Smith also assumed command with a steely certainty.

"At the moment his bat looks six feet wide," former Australia captain Mark Taylor said last year.

"Smith has got an insatiable appetite for runs. You can see when he bats, he gets in that little bubble. He's almost oblivious to everything that's going on around him, except the ball that is coming out of the bowler's hand."

If the Bradman comparison always remained notional rather than realistic, he was already ranked alongside much more experienced run-scoring legends, in the same class as Ponting, Sachin Tendulkar and Jacques Kallis.

But, as Ponting himself pointed out, Smith was already ahead of the curve.

"These guys have scored 15,000 and 13,000 runs, but they played in 150-plus Tests, Tendulkar 200 Tests, to achieve what they achieved," Ponting said.

"[Smith] is nearly halfway there in just over 50 Test matches."

The future, as well as the present, appeared to belong to him.

Changing of the guard

This week Smith fronted the media and told the world he was embarrassed, saying things needed to change.

Steve Smith's career seemed well ahead of the bell curve, earning comparisons with the game's greats. ( Reuters: David Gray )

He said much the same at Hobart in November 2016 after his side had been skittled for 85, their lowest total on home soil in over three decades, by the same opponents he tried to cheat this week.

From a sporting nadir, Smith emerged with his leadership enhanced.

He oversaw a scorched-earth policy that changed half the side. The improvement was emphatic and immediate.

A changing of the guard will follow this week's events, too. But this time without his input.

In India 12 months ago, with a team still a work in progress, much credit was earned in a narrow series defeat, Smith himself central to some rear-guard battling and front-foot ambition on the toughest assignment in world cricket.

And yet in hindsight there were perhaps signs that pressure was building.

He admitted during that tour that he rarely had more than a couple of hours' sleep during a Test, and needed medication to foster even that.

In the second Test of that four-match series he looked to his dressing room for help while deciding whether to call for a review into his lbw dismissal, against both the rules and spirit of the game.

He described the moment as a "brain fade".

Indian captain Virat Kohli was unconvinced. He accused Smith's side of routinely gaming the system, stopping just short of calling Smith a cheat himself but teasing journalists to do so.

Tough job takes its toll

The intensity which Smith brings to every game borders on the manic.

Cameron Bancroft and Steve Smith's admission has shocked Australia ( ABC News )

He is unable to disguise his emotions, good or bad. He would be a terrible poker player.

For all that he has achieved in the game, including centuries away to every Test-playing side bar Pakistan and multiple international and Australian player of the year awards, it is sometimes easy to forget how young he is for the elevated office he held until this week.

The gruelling nature of the India tour, home Ashes series and the fractious current series dogged by personal sledging and players needing to be separated from physical confrontations, has clearly taken a toll.

The decision to downgrade Kagiso Rabada's charge for barging Smith clearly infuriated him.

That is not to excuse his actions, but may in part explain an atmosphere in which a sense of victimhood had festered, the desperation to seize back control leading to the most idiotic as well as unsporting of decisions.

What the future holds for Smith is uncertain, save for the knowledge that this incident will hang round his neck for the rest of his career.

He has shown mental toughness in the past and has time on his side to return to the squad and contribute again.

However, the magnitude of this misdemeanour and the spotlight he will be under from here on raises questions over whether he will ever again be the same, free-flowing player.

What's next for Smith?

The one match ban meted out to him by the International Cricket Council, was met with astonishment by casual observers but was entirely in keeping with the severity with which the world governing body views ball tampering.

Other captains of rival nations have done similar — even if their crimes were more opportunistic than shamelessly pre-mediated — and had long and successful careers.

However, the reverence with which Australian sports fans hold the Baggy Green and the sense that this was not just a one off "brain fade" but the culmination of a foul culture at the heart of cricket casts doubt over the opportunity for complete redemption.

One of the saddest things about this whole suffocatingly depressing situation is that it will, rightly, take down one of the finest players of this or any generation.

The question remaining: will that downfall be temporary or permanent?

Australian fans already distraught over the behaviour of their national representatives will have their pain compounded by being robbed of seeing a truly great player fulfilling his near boundless potential.

In the immediate future at the very least.