Darren Lehmann, Australia’s soon-to-be ex-coach and a bruiser answering mainly to his nickname of “Boof”, is seldom shy of a strident opinion. Even in Cape Town, just one day before the Baggy Greens’ world caved in over the sandpaper plot, he had let rip about the behaviour of South African crowds.

“It has been disgraceful,” he fumed. “You are talking about abuse of players and their families. It’s not on anywhere in the world.”

As he strove to be taken seriously on social etiquette, it paid to recall how this was the same Lehmann who, in 2013, had said to a couple of local radio jocks about Stuart Broad: “I hope the Australian public give it to him for the whole summer. I hope he cries and goes home.” And it was the same Lehmann who, when given out in a one-day international against Sri Lanka in 2003, yelled “black c----”, drawing a five-match ban for racism, with officials later admitting they had considered throwing him out of the sport for life.

But now Lehmann, whose thuggish excesses have long been masked by his coaching success, has gone very quiet. At the infamous mea culpa by Cameron Bancroft and Steve Smith, where the captain disclosed how the ball-tampering had been the brainchild of the “leadership group”, he was nowhere to be seen. At the end of the next day’s play, with his players the pariahs of the sporting world, Lehmann again hid in the shadows, allowing stand-in captain Tim Paine to be thrown to the wolves.