Steve Smith and David Warner were booed during Australia’s warm-up fixtures against West Indies and England in Southampton. The Aussies won both matches, and Smith got runs in both, so perhaps they won’t care about a phenomenon that seems likely to continue throughout the World Cup, even if they get to the final on 14 July.

According to Smith, who spoke after taking a ton off England’s bowlers at the Hampshire Bowl on Saturday, the chants of “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” are like “water off a duck’s back – it doesn’t bother me”. But it should, because it is an expression of a wholly justifiable revulsion that cannot be wiped away by a few months in enforced exile from the game, followed by a smooth reinstatement in time for the big one.

When Smith, Warner and young Cameron Bancroft were sent home from Cape Town in March 2018, it was far from being the only time international cricketers have improperly messed around with the state of the ball. A lasting stain was added to the career of an England captain, Mike Atherton, by the dirt-in-the-pocket incident at Lord’s in 1994. We know Imran Khan and others got up to similar tricks but the episode involving the three Australians seemed to expose something deeper and nastier. As Gideon Haigh observed in Crossing the Line, his book about the episode, it showed the team in “fresh and uniquely unflattering lights: sneaky, furtive, oblivious and dim”.

The ruthless attitude so admired in teams led by generations of great Australia captains, envied even as it got under the skin of opponents and spectators, had evolved, under Smith, into a systematically unscrupulous way of getting results. Ultimately, Haigh puts the blame on the priorities of the men who run cricket in Australia and demand success. But if Smith, Warner and Bancroft were being forced to answer for an entire philosophy, then so be it. Eventually, someone had to take the rap.

When crowds in England boo Smith and Warner this summer it is not just because, as Australian cricketers, they represent a potential threat to English success. The blatancy of the act for which they were convicted represented a particularly contemptuous dismissal of the values the game once embodied and which survive, just about, in its various modern forms. But it is also because the redemption implied by the act of their return is simply not believed.

After a triumph or a catastrophe, sport loves nothing better than a redemption story. But some sporting misdeeds – those of Ben Johnson, for example – are judged to lie so far beyond the pale that, fairly or not, there is no coming back. The punishment they receive is exemplary and unforgiving. If the offence committed by Smith and Warner in Cape Town does not quite belong in that category, then their treatment seems unreasonably lenient, too cynically temporary. In the eyes of much of the cricketing public, they have not earned their shot at redemption.

For them, a year and bit is not long enough. For Lance Armstrong, the remainder of a lifetime might not do the job. Yet the disgraced former cyclist is back on public view this week, giving a set-piece interview to NBC television in order to remind us that he sees the process of redemption as something to be played out in public and granted on persistent demand.

Yet again Armstrong displays his continuing refusal to understand why it was that his seven Tour de France victories were expunged from the record and why he became a pariah. He thinks it was simply because he doped and that his doping was merely part of the way riders of his era went about their business.

He likens his discovery of performance-enhancing drugs after arriving in Europe to a straightforward escalation of weapons. “I knew there would be knives at this fight, not just fists,” he tells the interviewer, Mike Tirico. “I had knives but then one day people started showing up with guns. And that’s when you say, ‘Do I want to fly back to Plano, Texas, or walk over to the gun store?’ I walked over to the gun store. I didn’t want to go home.

“If we’re going to Europe and everybody’s fighting with their fists, we’d still win, I promise you that. That’s what I wish would have happened. But it didn’t. It was a mistake. It led to a lot of other mistakes. It led to the most colossal meltdown in the history of sports. But I learned a lot and it got me to the place I am now.”

That place, it turns out, is one “I wouldn’t want to trade with anybody”. Certainly not, one imagines, with the people he insulted and belittled, whom he slandered as liars, and whose lives he blighted and whose careers he attempted to destroy during the years in which he bossed the show. He still shows no real sign of understanding that his real offence was not the fact of his doping but the manner in which he went about it, so coolly making fools of those of us whose first instinct was to acclaim what presented itself as a life-affirming miracle. “I do think there’s a double standard,” he says, “but I’m OK with it.”

Six months ago, in another TV interview, he explained his dilemma to CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin: “I’ve got people who say, ‘He hasn’t apologised enough,’ and people who say, ‘Stop apologising.’” But if you’re looking for real redemption, Lance, rather than mere image rehab, there might be a third way. Just shut up. Perhaps do something genuinely good, quietly and unobtrusively. Then you might stand a chance.