Steve Smith is a latter day “Breaker” Morant, but it is the Coach and Executives who should face the firing squad, according to Fizza Sports Chief Latcho Drom from Cape Town

On Sunday, the prospect of Fizza Management paying my airfare to Cape Town proved about as likely as Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland uttering the word “cheats.”

I was forced to make what my old social cricket mate Mick would call an “executive decision.”

Reluctantly, amid howls of protest from the kids, I carried the big 65″ Olaf down to the local pawnbroker to haggle enough cash to book a hotel and fly to Cape Town to cover this story.

Dave Warner was spot on too; the Olaf is a magnificent TV, and it will be sorely missed by our whole family.

A the airport, a Cricket Australia delegation looked like men who had just lot a whole lot of money.

At least they get to fly business class.

As I squeezed into my budget economy Row ZZ seat, the blood circulation slowly attenuated, and for once I wished I was Oscar Pistorius.

Arriving in Cape Town – a day late, thanks to our editor dithering over my travel allowance – I was immediately struck by the natural beauty of the city and the locals’ keen sense of humour.

“How do the Aussies choose their team? Sandpaper, scissors, rock.”

“Where are the Aussies off to next? Tampa Florida.”

Beyond the odd one-liner however, people seemed far more interested in their lack of drinking water than in Warner and Steve Smith’s betrayal of the so-called “Australian cricket loving public,”

Not that promoting Aussie Pride anywhere in South Africa is a good idea at the best of times, particularly not after dark.

However, the new revelation that our national cricket team are not only a bunch of spoiled, oafish, win-at-all-costs pricks, but are now a bunch of cheating, spoiled, oafish, win-at-all-costs pricks is not exactly earth-shattering news in South Africa.

“Tampergate” merely reinforces a simple basic belief that our fellow cricket loving nations have long since held when it comes to Australia: we suck.

We trade in racist innuendo and moralising hypocrisy; we are bad losers and even worse winners; we confuse ad hominem abuse with “witty banter”; and we have little regard for the spirit of the game, the opposition, the umpires or officials.

If Cricket Australia is a top down organisation, it is little wonder then that the communication from head office offers very little by way of a counter-narrative to the widely perceived image of our national team.

Instead, CEO James “Cronulla” Sutherland confined himself to talk about “process” and how hurt he is, and “the need to re-engage with the public,” and being “utterly convinced” that only three people knew about the quick nick down to Newlands Hardware at lunch on day three.

Predictably, Captain Smith (Titanic had a Captain Smith), Warner – to whom I owe a personal debt of gratitude for putting me on to the curved screen Olaf – and Cam “The Lamb” Bancroft are hung out to dry, before being sent home (hopefully not in the same seats that I had to endure) to await court martial.

Sutherland then went onto to talk more about “process” and “balance” and already sports fans you can see this is not going to end well for these young men: wildly over-paid, obnoxious, reactive, naive and boorish young men, but young men nonetheless.

Now, the point of my story is not to condone nor condemn the “gang of three” (it wasn’t so long ago that CA and Channel Nine were telling us that us that it was “Good to be 3”).

Rather, I wish to point out that the scapegoating of these silly boys will do little to change the mean-spirited culture of Australian cricket or the global avatar of the ugly Australian.

In the Second Anglo-Boer War at the turn of last century, Australians Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock were also found guilty of illegal actions against South Africans after cracking up in battle.

They were of course court-martialed and shot, much like Smith and Warner will be by social media and their sponsors back in Sydney.

Yet Morant himself later came to be regarded as a scapegoat and even a victim of a closed judicial system hell bent on distancing itself from atrocities of its own making.

And like Smith and Warner, Lieutenants Morant and Handcock’s crime was not “the ends” of winning of a war at all costs, but “the means” of failing to obey a chain of command.

Ironically, this very “failure” on Smith and Warner’s part remains a matter of some conjecture, hence the cricketing world’s incredulity that Senior Coach Darren “Boof” Lehmann knew nothing of tape in the trousers or the hastily convened “leadership group” meeting.

I believe that both the coach and the executive are guilty of fostering, or at least appeasing, an on-field behaviour that has proved very damaging for Australian cricket, even by the very narrow measure of CA’s own commercial interests.

Even if we were to assess CA as business people alone. they would fare very poorly in the light of the looming heavy losses in sponsorship revenue and the value of TV and broadcast rights.

That revenue is of course critical for the funding of state level, district, local, junior, women’s, indigenous, all abilities, and even social cricket, as well as affording us all a more noble pastime than the current moral outrage and hysteria.

Regardless of who knew what and when, Tampergate represents a total failure of leadership in Australian cricket.

Heads must roll.

We can’t just shine one side of Steve Smith’s head and then rough up the other side,

END