It started with a young player, Cameron Bancroft, scuffing up a ball with sandpaper and being caught live on the big screen at Newlands during a Test match in South Africa eight years ago.

Now, in the second flowering of a scandal that Australian cricket thought it had buried, ‘Sandpapergate’ is engulfing it in an existential crisis that is only just beginning.

Back in 2018, Cricket Australia made scapegoats of three men – Bancroft, Steve Smith and David Warner – for the ball-tampering that was exposed during the third Test of the tour in Cape Town. It allowed the rest of the side to bathe in barely believable protestations of ignorance.

Those protestations were exposed as falsehoods by Usman Khawaja, Australia’s opening batsman during the tour, when he wrote in his new autobiography Sabr that the whole team knew what had been happening. His accusations sent sections of the Australian game scrambling into attempts at denial and damage limitation.

‘We have said we're comfortable with the outcome of the investigation based on the information we've received,’ Cricket Australia CEO Todd Greenberg said this week. ‘That includes what we've seen from Usman, and our position hasn't changed on that. We don't see any compelling reason to open the investigation or revisit this again.’

That cannot be allowed to stand. Greenberg’s statement is already looking outmoded, ill-judged, arrogant and tone-deaf. Australian cricket is tearing itself apart in front of him, its bedrock of ‘mateship’ replaced by accusations of selfishness, disloyalty and betrayal. Its integrity is shot to pieces along with its reputation.

And as the sport heads rapidly towards the beginning of an Ashes year, it is fair to suggest that if Cricket Australia will not discipline the rest of the players that Khawaja insists were in on the cheating, then the game’s governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC) must step in to do it for them.

Because bear in mind, too, that Khawaja has also claimed Australia cheated in the Ashes Tests against England in Adelaide and Perth a few months earlier, by picking at the quarter seam to raise flaps on it and help the ball reverse swing. That Ashes series of 2017-18 feels tainted now. Whatever punishments are visited on these Australia players, next summer’s Ashes will be stained by the deceptions they have perpetrated. 

The ICC’s rules may say a country cannot be punished for the same offence twice but it appears the nature of the offence to be prosecuted has changed. The ICC toughened their code of conduct after the Cape Town scandal and players found guilty of ball-tampering can now be banned for up to six Test matches.

The circumstances are very different but Sandpapergate 2 is fast becoming cricket’s version of the Manchester City cheating scandal that has left an indelible stain on that club’s recent history. Sandpapergate 2 is threatening to define a generation of Australian cricketers and hang a label around their neck they will find it hard to remove.

Smith and Warner, of course, were banned from international cricket for 12 months soon after the original offence came to light and Bancroft for nine months. If Khawaja’s allegations are true, then any players from that side who are still active ought to be facing similar sanctions.

Given that current Australia captain Pat Cummins, as well as Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood and Nathan Lyon, were also part of the Cape Town side, that could mean Australia going into next summer’s series in England without the majority of their bowling attack, something that would deal a hammer blow to Australian hopes of retaining the Ashes.

Impatience with Australia’s increasingly awkward attempts to insist that the bowling attack knew nothing about the ball-tampering in South Africa is growing all the time and curdling into anger and ridicule. ‘Why tamper if you ain’t going to tell the bowlers?’ former England bowler Derek Pringle asked yesterday.

I spoke to one England insider yesterday who said Australia were turning themselves into a cricketing laughing stock. ‘There is no way in the world that the rest of the lads in that team did not know what was going on,’ he said. ‘For reverse swing, the ball has to be in a certain condition. As the ball gets passed around, everybody knows why it is reversing and everybody knows how to treat the ball.

‘They were all in on it and everything else is b******s. They took the whole cricket world for fools in 2018 when they blamed it all on three players and now they’re trying to take us for fools all over again.’

Former England wicketkeeper Matt Prior also told Daily Mail Sport earlier this week that the claims of Australian bowlers to have known nothing about the cheating defied belief and that ball-tampering had to be a team effort.

‘There is just no way in any of the dressing rooms I played in that a conversation would have been had where the bowlers are not aware of what the plan is with the ball, and what you're all trying to do with it,’ Prior said. ‘Once that decision is made, it has to be a collective effort. A team effort.’

There are increasing signs that the crisis in Australian cricket is starting to spin out of control. Khawaja has abandoned his book tour after the scale of what he unleashed became apparent, Starc has disputed his claims, and Warner, who corroborated Khawaja’s claims, has ridiculed the views of Australia batting coach Graeme Hick that they were 'absolutely false'.

Cummins, who has stayed silent, is promising to speak to the media in the coming hours. Former Australia skipper Michael Clarke has admitted that the Australian cricket fans ‘can't trust what's real. They don't know the truth until this gets reopened… allow(ing) people to finally tell the truth, and move on.’

It is hard to see how Greenberg’s ‘nothing-to-see-here’ stance can survive much longer. As so often with controversies like this, it is the cover-up – or the attempted cover-up – that causes more damage than the original offence and Australian cricket is now deep in the process of eating itself.

What will cause it the most long-term damage is the abandonment of its principles of mateship that the scandal is exposing. To allow three players to take the fall for the actions of a team is the antithesis of the spirit of the Baggy Green that is supposed to be at the heart of Australian cricket. This is now a side and a sport at war with itself in Australia.

The team is now in a desperately difficult situation. If Cummins, Hazlewood, Starc and Lyon escape without censure and play in the Ashes next summer, they will be the subject of brutal and relentless mockery by the Barmy Army and sell-out crowds. The team will be led by four players accused of letting their mates swing when the going got tough.

‘The worst thing about all this for Australian cricket,’ the England insider said, ‘is how un-Australian it all is. What happened to mateship and standing by your pals? The Baggy Green cap is supposed to be a sacred symbol of togetherness and they might as well be trampling all over it.’

Former England batsman Mark Butcher also identified the loosening of the team bond as the most grievous blow for the Australians. ‘It is utterly inconceivable that the bowlers had no idea this was going on,’ Butcher said. 'Anybody who knows anything about reverse swing, everyone has to know or you screw it up and the ball stops reversing.

‘And so three of them had to take the fall. If there was some way of getting some recompense for loss of earnings or loss of career, I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t know how those three have slept. They have been utterly thrown under the bus and that was apparent from the very start.’

‘The three players did wrong,’ former England skipper Nasser Hussain said yesterday. ‘They did the crime and served the time but how a side can move on and say we are just going to let those three…

‘I remember the team, the Baggy Green, the mateship, they used to be together. That was what playing Australia was like. For an Australian team to say it was just those three, it was never going to be just those three.’