A match and series slipping away and a ball that could not get past the bats of South Africa's batsmen drove Australia's captain Steven Smith to an orchestrated attempt to cheat by tampering with the ball, a task carried out by the team's youngest member Cameron Bancroft with the use of adhesive tape to try to pick up some rough earth from the Newlands pitch.

After Bancroft was informed by the match referee Andy Pycroft of a formal charge with attempting to change the condition of the ball on Saturday night, he joined Smith to admit before the world what television cameras had captured a strong circumstantial case for. The Australians had cheated, knowingly and collectively, in an attempt to change the momentum of a match where they find themselves 294 runs behind with two days remaining.

Smith said the team's collective integrity would rightly be called into question by events in Cape Town, and said he was far from proud of the events that had transpired. He added that he would still have felt regret about the team's actions even if they had not been picked up by television cameras at the ground.

"The leadership knew about it, we spoke about it at lunch. I'm not proud of what's happened, it's not within the spirit of the game," Smith said. "My integrity, the team's integrity, the leadership groups integrity has come into question and rightfully so. It's certainly not on and it won't happen again, I can promise you that under my leadership.

"I'm not naming names but the leadership group were what talked about it and Bangers (Bancroft) was around at the time and we spoke about it and thought it was a possible way to get an advantage. Obviously it didn't work, the umpires didn't see it change the way the ball was behaving or how it looked or anything like that, so it was a poor choice and deeply regrettable our actions.