Two months later, Smith admitted to premeditated cheating. At a press conference on March 24 , after the third day of a Test match against South Africa in Cape Town, Smith said that he and Cameron Bancroft, the junior player sitting beside him, had colluded in a plan to tamper with the ball by roughing up the surface, which aids reverse-swing bowling.

The Australian newspaper named him its Australian of the Year, choosing him for the honour over nominees such as Chrissie Foster, the courageous campaigner for victims of clerical sexual abuse, medical researcher Sally Dunwoodie, who has dedicated her career to helping babies with congenital heart defects, and Kirsty Boden, the nurse who was killed trying to save others during a terrorist attack in London. According to the newspaper, Smith deserved the award not just for his prodigious feats on the cricket field but "because he embodies the qualities that define the Australian character at its best".

The responsibility of the captaincy appeared to inspire Smith. His game kept improving. Last summer, he played as if blessed by the cricket gods, scoring three centuries as he led Australia to a thumping Test series victory over England. By January, he was not only the world's number one batsman but Australia's favourite son.

Perry wasn't the only one. We all thought Smith was different. From 2014, when he first stepped into the role of Australian captain at the age of 25, he brought youthful enthusiasm and what looked to be ingrained decency to a side long known for surliness and swagger. He was open-faced, affable, as wholesome as a Weet-Bix ad. Also, he was a genius with a bat. Here was a cricketer everyone could like.

"I played first-grade cricket against a lot of Test players," says Perry, "and I found most of them to be extremely aggressive and hostile. They carried themselves as though they were better than you. Which they were, at cricket." But Smith? He seemed to Perry to be different. "He seemed to have a humanity to him."

Perry, co-author of the cult comic novel The Grade Cricketer, points out that Smith was a rapidly rising star: "We all knew he was going to play for Australia." Therefore, neither kindness nor courtesy was expected of him.

Steve Smith is in the air, diving to catch a ball. He is 17 years old and freakishly talented – a sandy-haired, blue-eyed sporting prodigy destined to become one of Australia's greatest cricketers. He will captain the national men's team, be compared to Don Bradman and earn the admiration of millions of cricket fans around the globe. But at this moment on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early 2007, his sole focus is on winning a first-grade club match being played in front of a few dozen spectators at North Sydney Oval. Hurtling towards the ball, which has been hit straight down the pitch, he crashes into 21-year-old Sam Perry, the batsman standing at the non-striker's end. "I remember being startled by how heavy the impact was," says Perry, now 32. "The end result was both of us sprawled on the ground." Even more of a surprise was what Smith did next: "He apologised quite profusely."

The tone dismayed Mickey Arthur, coach of the Australian team from 2011 to 2013. "They were almost blasé at the press conference," Arthur says. "'We'll just confess to it and it will all go away.' Well, hang on, the magnitude of this is massive. It was as if they didn't get it." In the end, Smith and Warner were banned for 12 months from playing for all Australian teams in international and first-class domestic competitions, Bancroft for only nine months because investigators had concluded he was following instructions.

When Smith next fronted the media , in Sydney on March 29, he was pale and contrite. He wept in the glare of the TV news crews' lights. But in Cape Town, before he knew he would be stripped of the captaincy and sent home from South Africa in disgrace, his mea culpa sounded less heartfelt than his apology to Sam Perry at North Sydney Oval. "Regrettable," he said. "We'll move on from this and hopefully we'll learn something from it."

Even at the press conference, the pair continued to mislead, attempting to spread the blame by attributing the plan to the team's "leadership group" and claiming the yellow stuff was a piece of adhesive tape which Bancroft had made abrasive by coating with granules of dirt. An investigation by Cricket Australia, the sport's national governing body, found it was sandpaper.

Incredulity was the initial reaction across the country. As Gordon says, "It really shook Australia." Smith's decision to come clean hadn't been triggered by a crisis of conscience. He and Bancroft had owned up to the plot – subsequently revealed to have been instigated by vice-captain and opening batsman David Warner – for the simple reason that they had been sprung: TV cameras at the cricket ground had caught Bancroft, who debuted in the Test team only four months earlier, rubbing the ball with a strip of yellow material which he then hid down the front of his trousers.

Watching in Perth was sport psychologist Sandy Gordon, a former consultant to the Australian cricket team, who could scarcely believe his ears: "I was sitting here thinking, 'You did what?' "

Sam Perry, who moved to London last year, says being an Australian who had written about cricket was enough to make him an instantly in-demand pundit, plied with invitations to talk on air about the sandpaper scam. "In England, they were fascinated with this story," he says. "People were extremely interested in what it said about the Australian character." In this country, some of us wondered about that, too. But mainly we were interested in what it said about the character of one man.

Australians love cricket. So popular is the sport in all its forms – Test matches, which last up to five days, One Day International matches and Twenty20 matches – that CA recently accepted $1.2 billion from the Seven Network and Foxtel for broadcast rights over the next six years. Still, the ball-tampering case had an impact that no one could have predicted, transfixing even the non-aficionados among us, making headlines even in non-cricketing nations. "It was in the French newspapers, the Italian newspapers, the American newspapers," says cricket coach and former Test fast bowler Geoff Lawson. "I got a call from Istanbul wanting me to comment on it. You go, 'Wow. What happened to the glorious irrelevance of sport?' "

But many people interviewed for this story argue that something has gone very wrong with Australian cricket. Specifically, they point to a team culture so deeply flawed that, in retrospect, the cheating in Cape Town looks almost inevitable. "It was like an end point of this culture," says John Inverarity, CA's chairman of selectors for three years to 2014.

The question hung in the air when the Australian team coach , Darren Lehmann, resigned despite being exonerated of involvement in the plot. It still hovered, unanswered, when Cricket Australia (CA) chief executive James Sutherland announced early this month that he would step down within a year. Sutherland, 52, insisted his decision to quit after 17 years as the sport's senior administrator had no connection with the ball-tampering scandal. David Peever, a former Rio Tinto mining executive who became CA's chairman in 2015, lavishly praised Sutherland and said: "The game has never been in a stronger position."

A branch of the Dymocks bookshop chain in Brisbane posted a picture on social media of Smith's recent memoir, The Journey, sitting on a shelf labelled True Crime. The joke cut close to the bone. Australians, baffled and angry, wondered whether Smith was ever the fine young man we had believed him to be. Perhaps we had been wrong about him all along. But if we weren't mistaken, if the aura of integrity hadn't been an illusion, something must have happened to change Smith. What turned the Australian captain into a cheat?

As a member of the NSW rookies' squad, Smith was expected to supplement training with part-time study or employment. "We got him a job at an RSL club," says Lewis. "Cleaning up bottles. Just a general kitchen hand. He was going to do that for six months." But the 18-year-old ended up quitting much sooner, having won a place on the NSW team. "I think he was in the job for five weeks," Lewis says. "That's probably the last time in his life he's actually ever done a normal day's work."

He's not happy to make 50 runs or even 100 runs – he just never wants to get out. He's genuinely devastated when he gets out.

He decided to leave school early and get on with his cricket career. "That was supported by Cricket NSW," says the organisation's then career and welfare manager, Tony Lewis, who joined discussions in the deputy headmaster's office on Smith's future. "Everyone in that meeting knew that Steve Smith was going to be a very good cricketer."

At Menai High School, he excelled at tennis and other sports, but cricket was his passion. Schoolwork wasn't high on his list of priorities, and early in year 12 he failed to submit a major English assignment, making it inevitable he would flunk the subject. This in turn meant he would not be awarded a Higher School Certificate (HSC). In his memoir, co-written by journalist Brian Murgatroyd, Smith sounds mildly aggrieved that he wasn't granted some kind of dispensation. "There was no leniency for me in completing the assignment," he says, "even though part of the reason for my failure was that I'd been playing school cricket matches."

Smith grew up in the middle-class suburb of Alfords Point , 30 kilometres south of the Sydney CBD. His father, Peter, an industrial chemist, had met his London-born mother, Gillian, a secretary, while working in the UK. The couple had two children: a daughter, Kristie, and three years later, Steve, born in 1989. From the age of five, Smith played weekend cricket, starting in an under-eights team. When asked by a primary school teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up, he didn't hesitate. A cricketer.

The incident came back to Geeves, now a Fox Sports online columnist, when he watched the last of four Test matches Australia played against India early last year. Smith batted heroically in the first innings but by the time he reached his century, lacklustre performances by Australia's other specialist batsmen – four of whom lost their wickets for a combined total of 21 runs – had put India in a position where it could win the match and therefore the series. Smith's frustration was obvious. "Rather than celebrate his hundred, he just looked fiercely at his batting group and his teammates," Geeves says. "I'd seen that look before. It was the same disgusted look I got when I jumped on the bus."

Similarly struck by Smith's single-mindedness was Tasmanian cricketer Brett Geeves, who in 2009 spent a week with him and a group of up-and-coming players at Cricket Australia's Centre of Excellence – now the National Cricket Centre – in Brisbane. Geeves, who was the oldest at 26, says 19-year-old Smith didn't join the others in after-hours activities: "He was really different, really insular, really isolated from the group socially. He wasn't out drinking, he wasn't partying. He was just so dedicated to the game." A minibus was due to depart at 6am one morning for a compulsory gym session across town, and Geeves almost missed it because he'd been out late with friends. When he leapt aboard, dishevelled and smelling of booze, he got a rowdy welcome from all but one of the young cricketers. "I distinctly remember the look of disdain I got from Steve Smith," he says. "It was icy."

Blucher had been engaged by CA to counsel junior cricketers about the importance of keeping open other career options, in case their sporting ambitions were stymied for some reason. With Smith, it was like talking to a brick wall, he says. "He was going to be a cricketer. That's the only thing he wanted to do. I remember I went back to the guy who had me doing this work and said, 'Shit, I hope cricket works out because there ain't a lot else there.' "

Sports marketing consultant Michael Blucher, who met Smith a decade ago, suspects that the then-teenager would cheerfully have agreed to play for his country for the next 20 years without receiving a cent. "A nice kid," says Blucher. "Polite, friendly." But what really stood out about Smith was his utter devotion to the game: "He was just 100 per cent cricket. That was the only thing in his life."

The ball-tampering bombshell saw him dropped by two of his major sponsors, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Weet-Bix manufacturer Sanitarium. He also lost a $2.4-million contract to captain the Rajasthan Royals in this year's six-week Indian Premier League tournament. Even so, he is an extremely wealthy 29-year-old, with a real estate portfolio reported to include six residential properties in Sydney. He lives at beachside Coogee, in an apartment he bought for $1.75 million in 2011.

Smith's primary school teacher was wrong when she told him he wouldn't make a living as a cricketer. CA does not divulge how much it pays its players – and Smith declined to be interviewed for this story – but his base annual salary before his recent sidelining was reported to be up to $2 million. Corporate sponsorship significantly boosted this income.

For all the voodoo that surrounds it, and the myriad arcane rules that govern it, cricket is at heart a simple game. Played between two teams, it is in essence a battle between individuals. A bowler, helped by strategically placed fielders, tries to dismiss a batsman, whose goal is to score runs while defending a wicket – a set of three wooden stumps on which are balanced two small sticks, called bails. Lounging in front of the telly last summer, it wasn't necessary to know the difference between backward square leg and silly mid-off to savour the spectacle of Smith breaking the hearts of the Poms. By the end of that series, he had the second-highest Test batting rating of all time. Only Don Bradman's was better.

Like Bradman, Smith is famous for the free-flowing unorthodoxy of his batting style. "If a 13-year-old kid turned up in the nets and started batting like him," says former Australian cricket team doctor Peter Brukner, "the coach would be immediately saying, 'No, no, no, mate. That'll never work.' " Brukner spent five years attached to the team before retiring last year, and says Smith's virtuosity can be attributed at least partly to an uncomplicated truth: "He just loves batting. He'd happily bat all day, every day."

In the practice nets, Smudge, as his fellow cricketers call him, "will bat for as long as there are bowlers to bowl to him", Brukner says. "He was always the first out there, he was always the last to leave. We were always sitting in the team bus: 'Smudge is having another hit, we'll have to wait till he's finished.' It's no coincidence that he was the best player on the team. He worked harder than anyone else."

Another thing about Smith: he is ultracompetitive. "He's not happy to make 50 runs or even 100 runs – he just never wants to get out," Brukner says. "I mean, he's genuinely devastated when he gets out. Angry with himself. Almost inconsolable."

Smith has a head full of match statistics and an inexhaustible appetite for cricket lore. With older players, he has always been respectful and attentive, grateful for any pearls of cricketing wisdom they might impart. He tells in his book of spending hours on tour in the company of NSW and Australia teammate Brad Haddin. "I liked to be a sponge for his knowledge," he writes.

According to another former teammate, Ryan Harris, now a Cricket Australia high-performance coach, "Brad would say – and this was obviously tongue-in-cheek – 'I can't get this little bugger out of my room. All he wants to do is talk cricket.' "

In 2010, the year he was selected to play for Australia, Smith made an effort to lighten up. "I've been told that I've got to come into the side and be fun," he said to a reporter. "Whether it's telling a joke or something like that, it's to make sure we're all upbeat and ready to go." Dropped in 2011, he returned to the team a couple of years later, at 23, after narrowing his focus, abandoning spin bowling to concentrate on batting. He soon transformed himself into such a valuable player that within a couple of years he was Australia's acting captain, standing in for the injured Michael Clarke. When Clarke retired eight months later, in August 2015, Smith replaced him.

He's almost like a little kid who plays an adult sport. Coach Geoff Lawson

Some have questioned whether he was temperamentally equipped for the leadership. "Smith's boyish exterior hides… well, a boyish interior," cricket writer Gideon Haigh observed this year, adding: "Interpersonal relations occur at a pitch he does not quite hear."

Coach Geoff Lawson likes Smith but says: "He's almost like a little kid who plays an adult sport." When the Australian captain collapsed in tears at the Sydney media conference after his return from Cape Town, columnist Brett Geeves' sympathy was mixed with concern. "To me, it seemed like watching a 10- or 11-year-old boy who was in trouble," Geeves says.

If Smith is less mature than the average 29-year-old, John Inverarity thinks he knows why. When Inverarity was appointed to head the panel that selects the Australian team, he not only had behind him a couple of decades as a top cricketer – he played for Australia and two state teams – but a distinguished career as a teacher and school principal.

Now 74, he makes the point that it used to be normal to combine playing cricket with having another job. People worked or studied or did apprenticeships as they battled their way up through the grades in club cricket, then landed spots in state teams and hoped to catch the eye of the national selectors. These days, he says, it's completely different. "Those who are talented are identified at an early age and they get put into squads, go through academies and schools of excellence. And all they know is cricket."

In these institutions "everything is done for them", Inverarity adds. "They're told to be at practice at 10am and the balls are out, the coaches are there. They're taken through their warm-up. They don't have to think." No wonder the cricketers produced by this system lack qualities found in most adults, he says. "When everything is done for people, they tend not to develop initiative, resilience, independence."

Geoff Lawson, who sometimes talks to young cricketers about his own Test career in the 1980s, says they occasionally ask him what routine he followed the day after a match. Did he have a massage? A session in the pool? They are mystified when he replies that he got up and went to work. "No, no, cricket wasn't our living," he explains to them. "I went to university and became an optometrist to make a living."

Lawson was reminded of the advantages of a rounded education when he and Smith spent time together during the last interstate Sheffield Shield competition. Lawson, assistant coach of the NSW Blues, is a crossword enthusiast, and Smith, the team captain, got into the habit of working on puzzles with him. "Steve would have the crossword on the tablet, of course. I'd be scribbling in the newspaper," says Lawson, who was taken aback by how many words were unfamiliar to Smith and other players who joined them. "What I think is standard vocabulary, they've got no idea what it is."

Peter Brukner knows from travelling with the Australian team as its doctor that most players spend their evenings watching movies in their hotel rooms. Their knowledge of film is encyclopaedic, he says. "Give them one line of a movie and they'll tell you what the movie was and who was in it." Unfortunately, their erudition seems to end there: "They know cricket and they know movies. Other than that, they know nothing. It's frightening." During foreign tours, Brukner tried to broaden the cricketers' horizons, giving them short weekly talks about the places in which they were playing. Apart from anything else, he hoped to arouse their curiosity. "I just thought, 'These kids go to all these interesting countries and they never see a thing.' If you organised a day trip to the Taj Mahal, they wouldn't go. Bizarre."

Smith is actually a keener traveller than most. When he proposed to his girlfriend, Dani Willis, last June, it was on top of the Empire State Building in New York. But during the time he spends in hotels with fellow cricketers – up to 300 days a year, overseas and in Australia – he doesn't get out much. Willis, a commerce-law graduate who usually accompanies Smith on tour, has been quoted as saying that the team once stayed in a Dubai hotel for 22 nights – "and honestly, of those 22 nights, we ate room-service dinner for 20. That's Steve, you know. He likes to bunker down. He likes routine and I get that."

In its way, life in the Australian team is just as cocooned and cosseted as in the cricket academies, in the opinion of sports marketer Michael Blucher. "The players are told what to do, what to wear, what to eat, where to be at what time," Blucher says. "They don't have to make too many decisions." They don't have to confront many problems, either. "The greatest calamity, after getting out for a duck or dropping an important catch at first slip, is when they get to a hotel and they can't get on the Wi-Fi."

Tony Lewis, the former Cricket NSW manager who organised Smith's brief stint as a kitchen hand, is now chief executive of Tasman Rugby Union in New Zealand. "Professional sportsmen, they live in a bubble," Lewis says. "Sometimes that bubble bursts. And when it does, it's horrible."

With fiancée Dani Willis, who notes that he “likes routine”. Credit:Getty Images

Smith has trouble sleeping during Test matches. At the crease, he is a fidgeter. He can play giddy innings of apparently carefree inventiveness, but he can also be a picture of furious concentration, as when he spent more than eight hours scoring 141 not out in the first Ashes Test in Brisbane last November. Fairfax columnist Malcolm Knox described him during that match-saving marathon as "constantly gibbering to himself, tapping down the top of his helmet, punching imaginary shots, adjusting phantom wrinkles in his gear, compulsively signalling to the overworked 12th man, swatting tennis overheads, scolding himself for obscure mental errors, flashing every emotion on the spectrum. At times he was ranting and raving like a park-bench eccentric."

Geoff Lawson sympathises: "Your whole life has been cricket and now you're captain of Australia and the pressure is extraordinary in many ways." As Brukner points out, CA bosses have certain requirements: "They expect you to perform well and win more often than not. If you don't, then you're in trouble." That's because cricket is big business, says former Test player Stuart Clark, now a senior executive at NSW Rugby League.

At cricket's head office, everything hinges on keeping the money rolling in – "and if the Australian cricket team isn't successful, sponsorships and TV deals are nowhere near as big, so the revenue is not being generated", Clark says.

A year into Smith's captaincy, in 2016, Australia was ignominiously thrashed by South Africa in Hobart. It was the team's fifth consecutive Test defeat, and CA's James Sutherland went to the dressing room after the match and read the riot act. "I hope it's not something I'll ever experience again," Smith wrote in his memoir. Half the team was sacked. What bothered Geoff Lawson was that wicketkeeper Peter Nevill – "a very ethical person" – was dropped in favour of Matthew Wade, apparently for the sole reason that Wade was known to be louder and more aggressive on the field. "There was no ambivalence about it," Lawson says. "They said it: 'We are picking Matthew Wade because he is a more abusive voice behind the stumps.' "

Sledging, the practice of goading and insulting opposition players with the object of destroying their confidence or concentration, has long been part and parcel of Australian cricket. In the early 2000s, it flourished under the captaincy of Steve Waugh, who dignified it with the title of "mental disintegration". Since then, the bullying has become so endemic that in 2014 South African captain Faf du Plessis likened the Australian team to a "pack of dogs".

Lawson says our players are raised to believe that verbal attacks help them win matches. The message is "reinforced by coaches and administrators, CEOs and chairmen", he says. "The whole system has to a degree encouraged it."

Former WA Sheffield Shield cricketer and Olympic hockey coach Ric Charlesworth understands that by the time Smith led his team to South Africa in February, the Australians were prepared to take taunting opponents to a new level. "One of their tactics was to upset [South African bowler] Kagiso Rabada, so he would get suspended," Charlesworth says. "It was discussed at meetings. I mean, what on earth are we doing if we're thinking like that?"

Smith and former Australian coach Darren Lehmann. Credit:AAP

Darren "Boof" Lehmann was the Australian coach for Smith's entire tenure as captain, and is said to have substantially shaped the team culture. The Grade Cricketer co-author Sam Perry says Lehmann gave a presentation to participants in an invitation-only high-performance coaching course run by CA in Brisbane in 2014. Called "The Australian Way", the presentation was accompanied by slides, which Perry sends me. On one slide, headed "Batting", the first point is "WTBC – Can't hit what you can't see!" Says Perry: "I didn't know what this meant, but a friend of mine who was at the course said, 'WTBC stands for Watch The Ball C…' "

Perry doubts that Lehmann – who declined an interview – set out to shock. In cricket, "it's so normalised, speaking like that", he says. In fact, plenty of cricketers would divide their male acquaintances into four categories: "A good bloke, a pretty good bloke, a c… or a bit of a c…". Lehmann, a former Test player, received a five-match suspension in 2003 after exclaiming "F…ing black c…s!" when he lost his wicket in a game against Sri Lanka. Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston has reported that in a London bar in 2013, Lehmann called him a "shirt-lifter" (a term used to denigrate homosexuals) and referred to the Australian batsman Usman Khawaja, a Muslim, as a "shoe bomber".

When asked this year about his attitude to ball-tampering, Lehmann said: "Obviously there are techniques used by both sides to get the ball reversing. That's just the way the game goes. I have no problem with it." He was right that bowlers have always surreptitiously worked on the ball – polishing it on one side, scuffing it on the other. But using a foreign object to do so is forbidden. And taking sandpaper onto a cricket ground? Unprecedented, according to the people I interview.

"There's no excuse," says John Buchanan, the Australian cricket team's coach for eight years to 2007, who can nevertheless see how Smith might have arrived at the decision. Australia had won the first Test in Durban, then lost the second in Port Elizabeth. Ill-feeling between the two teams was so strong that Australian vice-captain Warner had come close to punching South African wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock in a stairwell. Smith was furious that the brilliant bowler Kagiso Rabada had successfully appealed against his suspension imposed for shoulder-bumping Smith during the second Test. By day three of the third Test, says Buchanan, the Australians would have seen the game slipping away from them, and Smith – "who at that point really can't think clearly" – would have been desperate to wrest back control. When Warner suggested sandpapering the ball, his captain either endorsed the idea or failed to quash it. The result was the same. "Basically," says Buchanan, "he walks out onto the field and says, 'Yes, we're going to cheat.' "

Coach Trent Woodhill has no doubt that, seen from inside the bubble in which Smith, Warner and Bancroft lived, this seemed a reasonable course of action. They "may not have been directed to scratch the cricket ball," Woodhill says, "but the system said, 'Do what you can to win this game.'"

To former Australian coach Mickey Arthur, a key point is that the three seem to have assumed they would get away with it. Now coach of the national Pakistan side, South African-born Arthur says he loved working with Australian players but was constantly aware of a collective presumption that they were untouchable: "We're the Australian cricket team. We can do what we want."

To Michael Blucher, who has written a book called Bubble Boys: The Increasingly Complex World of Our Nation's Sports Stars, it is never especially surprising when coddled elite athletes behave in ways that seem clueless to the rest of us. "We blur the boundaries for them and then we're appalled when they step over them."

That sense of entitlement former coach Mickey Arthur noticed has been part of the ethos of the Australian cricket team for some time. The new coach, former Test batsman Justin Langer, writes in his memoir, Australia You Little Beauty, of a dinner in Bermuda in 1995 to celebrate a victory over the West Indies. As Langer nostalgically recalls, he and other team members "flicked caviar at each other across the table like schoolboys". A fleet of taxis ordered to the restaurant at midnight was kept waiting for three hours, meters running, "while we continued to party inside, occasionally sending caviar or a pile of chicken drumsticks out to the drivers".

Langer has a good coaching record – he did wonders with the WA Sheffield Shield team – and his appointment as Darren Lehmann's successor has been widely applauded. But his past is not without controversy. While playing in a Test in Sri Lanka in 2004, he was caught on camera flicking a bail off the stumps as he walked past between overs. The then Australian captain, Ricky Ponting, appealed to the umpires to rule the batsman out "hit wicket". Langer maintained the bail removal was accidental, and the match referee cleared him of wrongdoing. Five years earlier, in a match against Pakistan, bowler Wasim Akram was certain that Langer had nicked a ball before it was caught by the wicketkeeper. Many others thought so, too. But the umpire ruled him not out, and Langer insisted for years that the sound heard around the ground was merely the click of his dodgy bat handle. Not until more than a decade had passed did he breezily admit that he had lied.

At the media conference to announce his appointment as Australian coach, Langer referred to sledging as "banter" and said there was a place for it if it did not cross the line. Asked who was responsible for where the line was drawn, he said: "Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong."

Australian coach Justin Langer, left, with Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland. Credit:Getty Images

While Smith, Warner and Bancroft serve their sentences, veteran ABC cricket commentator Jim Maxwell waits to be convinced that they were alone in the conspiracy, as the CA investigators concluded. Maxwell strongly suspects that others in the team knew what was going on. He also disputes Smith's claim that the Cape Town caper was the team's first and only attempt at cheating. "As I understand it, this was the third time they'd tried this little trick of sandpapering one side of the ball," says Maxwell, who isn't suggesting Smith ever tampered with a ball himself. "But if Smith didn't know, I'll be most surprised."

Two inquiries are underway. One, by a panel of current and former players, is examining the conduct and culture of the national men's team. "A joke," says Ric Charlesworth. "As if they're going to rat on their mates." The other, by The Ethics Centre consulting firm, which last year appraised the inner workings of the Australian Olympic Committee, is looking at the overall culture of CA. "The cultural review should be about ensuring that the people who made these mistakes at the top are no longer able to be around people whose young minds are forming," says Woodhill.

To Sam Perry, who has been convinced of Steve Smith's underlying goodness since their collision at North Sydney Oval, the best outcome would be for a simple truth to dawn on everyone in Australian cricket. "It is actually possible to be extremely successful without being a prick," he says.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.