Lehmann was always going to resign over this sorry saga

A failure to see what was in plain sight to everyone else was part of the problem for this Australia team and Darren Lehmann epitomised that as he tried to hang on to his job this week.

From captain to coach, too many in this saga were too slow to grasp the enormity of what was going on, starting with the captain in Cape Town who thought ball-tampering would go unnoticed and then seemed oblivious to the implication of his confession to premeditated cheating.

Lehmann was guilty, too, of a lack of self-awareness when trying to claim he could be the man to change a team’s culture he was responsible for ingraining. When he said he wanted to turn Australia into New Zealand, the chortles could be heard all the way from Auckland to Sydney, for Lehmann’s team had ridiculed the Kiwis for being too nice to be winners.

But, despite the promises to carry on, those who know Lehmann were adamant he was close to the point of resignation, as The Daily Telegraph revealed this week. Cricket Australia did its best to mock that suggestion when it backed him to carry on and hit out at “inaccurate” media reports, but the facade evaporated when Lehmann saw Smith in tears.

Finally, the penny dropped and a coach who cares deeply about his players knew he had to go. “This will allow Cricket Australia to complete a full review into the culture of the team and allow them to implement changes to regain the trust of the Australian public,” he said. “This is the right thing for Australian cricket.”

Lehmann was appointed in 2013 to bring back hard-headed Australian values many felt had disappeared under Mickey Arthur, who Sutherland sacked, in part, for failures of discipline. Hours before Lehmann’s resignation, Arthur wrote a revealing article for the Players’ Voice website about Australia’s refusal to change its culture. He hit the bull’s-eye with his description of the appointment of his successor.

“I’ve got a lot of admiration for Darren. I think he’s a fine coach. But the impression I got was, at a period in time where they could’ve been addressing the broader issue of team culture, Cricket Australia were instead intent on bringing in an Aussie knockabout for beers at the bar at 6pm, telling stories about yesteryear, everyone sitting around the campfire and having a laugh and going to bed happy. It was going to be hard to make meaningful change in that environment.”

Unlike England, who have decisions to make about their own head coach, Australia have several candidates who can take the job and rebuild a shattered team. In that sense, they are lucky.