‘These events’ are not the cause of the anger, they are its outlet. Peever identified the ‘integrity and reputation of Australian cricket’ being at stake. That’s right, but its integrity and reputation were not suddenly questioned because of what happened one afternoon in Cape Town.

Many Australians, it seems, have been waiting in a dark alley with cricket bats. Social media has given them voice. In times past, players thought their only critics were a maverick nuisance in press boxes, to whom they gave the finger or otherwise ignored. Nay-sayers did not represent the adoring masses. Now, haters of the Australian team haunt every club, every house, every keyboard. The team is deeply alienated from its own public. There is mutual grievance. When they lost meekly to South Africa two years ago, the Australian cricketers were lambasted. Then, their muscular, aggressive rebound was applauded. Winning was the purifier. They thought the public was giving them a licence to win by any means. And so here we are.

What it only half-understands is the fundamental reason this created such disappointment and outrage in Australia, why these guys are out of cricket for a year for an act that put South Africa’s Faf du Plessis out of cricket for a week. It is not the world’s condemnation for the Australian cricket team. It is the eruption of pent-up distaste, even hatred, for the Australian team within this country.

The punishments – too heavy, not heavy enough – have an already disillusioned and sceptical public feeling it is taken for a fool. If the first inquiry’s findings are correct, we are being asked to accept the following. That for all the years David Warner has been ‘taking care’ of the ball, he has never doctored it illegally. That Warner has never in fact cheated in this way, because in Cape Town all he did was instruct Cameron Bancroft on how to do it. That Bancroft was not also up to mischief with the sugar in the pocket during the Ashes series, or at any other times when he wasn’t caught on film. That Steve Smith only ever participated in this cheating for the first time in Cape Town, where he was unlucky enough to be caught. That other questionable actions of Smith’s, such as the DRS incident in Bangalore last year, were not part of an ongoing culture of cheating. That the bowlers never knew that the ball handed to them by Warner at mid-off and suddenly began reverse-swinging was not just a marvel of their own skill. That Darren Lehmann, not so much a coach as a father to this team, never knew anything at any time.

So all that went wrong was one moment of madness in Cape Town? If that’s all it was, why are Smith and Warner banned for a year?

It’s a lot of credulity to ask of a public in its current mood. CA is drawing down on its reserves of goodwill, but the bank is empty. Punishing Smith and Warner, while a proper first step, will do nothing to make the public like their team again. Many will like their team even less. That is, those who haven’t already stopped calling it ‘their’ team. And it will not make the team like their public again either.

The second review, planned for later in the year but yet to be given specific terms and dates, proposes to go deeper. If CA understands the depth of its alienation from the public, James Sutherland will no longer be chief executive by then. There have been a lot worse administrators in sport, and certainly in cricket. Sutherland will point to a long list of achievements and successes. But at times of crisis, his most consistent success has been isolating himself from direct responsibility. It’s a century-old tradition in Australian cricket, where disgrace has always been an orphan. Sutherland can no more lead yet another investigation into the conduct of his staff, while claiming to stand above their misdeeds, than Ian Narev could absolve himself from the crookedness of the Commonwealth Bank.

Corporate responsibility also exists within the team. Australia should not be playing in the charade in Johannesburg. It devalues Test cricket. None of the team who played in Cape Town should still be there. Why would it be their fault if they had nothing personally to do with the cheating? Simply because they are a team. Some of them had nothing to do with it when they took no wickets or scored no runs during Test matches which Smith and Warner won for them. But they all got to celebrate because they were a team, all in it together regardless of who contributed what. Now, suddenly, they were not a team in Cape Town. They were eight innocents plus three cheats. Why do the remaining eight do not deserve the honour of a Test cap in Johannesburg? Because, to quote a famous line, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. The Cape Town changing room is a small place, and the innocents, with their innocent coach, as always, had been trained to turn a blind eye. Oh – there is one get-out – that nobody in the team ever suspected Warner was up to anything with that ball for the past six years. As a slew of ex-players might put it, 'Laugh? I couldn’t stop crying'.