OPINION: Missing from the summer of cricket: Steve Smith, David Warner and reverse swing for Australia's bowlers. It's unlikely the last of those three will give interviews or shoot commercials, but the dark art is in its own dark place.

Where did the reverse swing go? In recent summers, particularly since the advent of drop-in wickets, Australia have won home test matches with the help of a swinging old ball - even when it wasn't that old. Mitchell Starc in particular was able to get a scuffed ball talking Irish on Australian wickets.

By contrast, there was barely a hint of reverse swing in Adelaide and Perth, and this week in Melbourne, Starc and his mates had two very old balls to work with. Not a peep. Funny game, cricket.

Not that anyone would imply that it was Australia's specialist ball-looker-after-er, Warner, who did anything underhand to get that old ball to swing, but England's Stuart Broad made a pertinent point after the Cape Town debacle.

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RYAN PIERSE/ GETTY IMAGES Australian bowling unit members Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Nathan Lyon and Pat Cummins. Absentee: Reverse Swing.

During last summer's Ashes series, Broad said, the Englishmen observed that Australia were able to "reverse [swing] the ball in nearly all of those test matches, sometimes in conditions where you wouldn't expect the ball to reverse".

He wasn't accusing Australia of illegal tampering, as such, to obtain reverse swing during the Ashes; he was merely asking why, given their success in getting the ball to reverse, they had taken to illegal sandpapering in Cape Town.

"I don't understand why they have changed their method for this one game," Broad said, butter still stubbornly refusing to melt in his mouth.

Indeed. Why change a successful legal method then, and why, if The Method was used to good effect in Australia, is it not working this summer? Are they trying it without success? Was the method suspended with Warner? Was there ever such a legal method? Mystery of mysteries.

ALASTAIR GRANT/AP What changed? England bowler Stuart Broad has been unable to work out why the Australian bowlers changed their method for just the Cape Town test after enjoying prodigious swing all-summer long.

Warner is keeping his silence, even as the karma bus goes around the block and comes back to run him over yet again. He has company, with Smith having thrown Cricket Australia bosses James Sutherland and Pat Howard under it too. Under that bus is one crowded, dark place.

It must be acknowledged that Smith and Cameron Bancroft, in their first drafts at history, have done nothing more than provide extra detail on what was already known. The way the sandpaper affair has flared up again is not a reflection on truths suddenly revealed, or clarity suddenly emerging.

We knew that Warner cooked up the plan and Bancroft agreed to carry it out. We knew that Smith enabled it to happen. We knew that Smith and Bancroft abrogated their duties, one as captain and the other as a thinking adult, to stop it. And yet, despite the absence of news, much is being read into the pattern of Warner being singled out for blame, again.

When Smith was remaining silent, getting close to the community and playing grade cricket, his image was rehabilitating itself in his absence, as it were. It is generally agreed that his conscious efforts at image repair have gone off like a bent arrow. Bancroft spoke publicly in preparation for the end of his ban and his return to Big Bash League cricket. Together, their interviews have shown how much work Justin Langer has still to do on cleansing the toxicity of his team's culture.

A TEAM FULL OF ME

Is it really a team at all? What has been revealed is that the relation of Smith, Warner and Bancroft to the absence of reverse swing is the same as the relation of "I don't want to know about it" to "every man for himself".

Remember, the bowlers didn't want to know about it either; they didn't want to know about it even before they could make a decision to not know about it. If this was a stockbroking firm, they would all be working behind Chinese walls. What has been revealed is not just a toxic team culture: it is the underlying fissures beneath the very idea of "team".

Every man for himself has been part of the fibre of professional cricket since its genesis. The Australian cricket team was created as a commercial enterprise and some players were always more enterprising than others.

RYAN PIERSE/ GETTY IMAGES David Warner's been doing it easy in Sydney club cricket while serving out his suspension from the representative level.

Divisions bubbled up in the 19th century, boiled over when Don Bradman created personal promotional outlets for himself in the 1930s, causing resentment among his teammates, and individual opportunism has been a constant of the past two decades.

The periods when Australian teams really pulled together and subsumed their differences have been the historical exceptions rather than the rule. To be sure, the DNA of division will take more than a year of apologies to turn around.

Since the blow-up in Cape Town, "every man for himself" has been the major theme of Australia's response, whether within or without the playing XI. Sutherland and Howard sought to protect their positions until they couldn't any more.

Darren Lehmann separated himself from direct knowledge of the ball-tampering plot. Smith and Bancroft continue to draw a moral line between what they did and what Warner did. And those fast bowlers – Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Patrick Cummins – who so clevely exploited reverse swing to win the Ashes? Well, they just took the ball from Warner with one hand and held their noses with the other. When the manure hit the fan, this was a whole team of Sergeant Schultzes: "I know nothing".

A team? Only in name. They were a collection of individuals each focused on their particular jobs. As a team they took the plaudits for winning matches with a reverse-swinging ball, yet they took no responsibility for how it came to happen. What this points to is a reality of modern professional cricket that, ironically, may allow Warner to integrate (if not assimilate) back into their campaigns in 2019.

If Warner's relationship with his former teammates is as fractured as it appears, does it really matter? This is manifestly not a football or basketball team, where the interconnections of trust are paramount to performance. Nor is it a club or social cricket team, bonded more or less by friendship.

MARK EVANS/ GETTY IMAGES Banned Australia captain Steve Smith trains with the Sydney Sixers Big Bash side in the week before Christmas, 2018.

The Australian cricket team has increasingly been a group of atomised individuals – elite athletes - playing under a banner of symbolic unity but practical convenience. Compared with their predecessors, they don't socialise together, they don't travel and suffer together, they don't room together, and in the old sense of the word they don't really tour together. Broken into specialised units for high-performance training and assessment, they are a federation of autonomous republics, each with their own interests, their own management, their own agendas and ambitions.

This entropy explains why so many within that organisation were able to evade responsibility for Cape Town and continue to do so. The team might have won collectively, but did not suffer scandal collectively.

If you are to believe the version of events put out by Warner's teammates – that they knew nothing of The Method, nothing of the sandpaper, it was not their department – and this is not a team as you might commonly understand it, then the pathway to return is open.

While it would seem morally impossible for the Australian team to have it both ways – to benefit from The Method, to lose it, to dodge blame when it went wrong – it will also make possible the reintegration of individuals such as Smith and Warner.

Nobody expects anyone else to act against his best interests. Every man for himself: it's what enables them to cut miscreants loose, and for better and worse, it's also what will enable them to bring the miscreants back in.