Important than winning the urn

Asshole Rule, “strategically positioned on my desk”, so that anyone entering his office could see the title, Langer explains. “I’ve learnt from a lot of great companies and great sporting teams.”

To a new coach and the Ethics Centre report – of which 41 of the 42 recommendations were accepted, all except that Australia’s best players should play in the Sheffield Shield rather than international Twenty20 games – was added a new players’ pact unveiled in October.

The central plank, “We want to make all Australians proud”, was part of broader attempts to re-engage the public. The pact was developed jointly by the male and female international teams. “We had a benchmark – both in terms of on-field performance and playing in a manner that’s consistent with the spirit of cricket,” Roberts reflects. “We ended up looking really closely at what the Australian women’s team represent.”

For the Australia men’s team, there is now a subtly different idea of what success looks like.

Once, a 2-1 home Test series defeat by India, Australia’s first such loss to the country, would have defined the home summer for the men’s national team. This time was different.

“The goal would always be to win because we’re in professional sport. But the expectation that the players have of themselves, and we have of them, is to compete with respect,” Roberts says. “I’ll always remember our last season as the season when the Australian men’s cricket team really started to reconnect with the public.”

Players made a conscious effort to sign more autographs, while TV cameras were allowed into the team dressing room to make the players more relatable. They also behaved better. For the first time in eight years, they did not have a single ICC code of conduct case lodged against them in their home summer. Indeed, no Australian has violated the code since Cape Town.

Cricket Australia believes this flowed down to the grass roots. Last summer there was a 74 per cent decrease in code of conduct charges across the game, including a 95 per cent decrease at under-age national championship level.

The salience of the image of the men’s national team is heightened by concerns about participation numbers. Overall it has declined by seven per cent since 2016, from 392,000 to 365,000; a recent report in the Australian newspaper the Sun-herald claimed that the true figure is now more like 250,000. “The events of Cape Town did impact how many people viewed cricket,” Roberts says. “Sentiments were affected at the time. It’s just a little hard to say what the impact of that was on participation.”

No longer will the team try to “headbutt the line”, as Nathan Lyon said before both the last Ashes series and the home series with South Africa in 2016. Roberts explains: “Does it make Australians Stepped down as head coach but cleared of any wrongdoing by Cricket Australia. Given job at CA’S national performance programme within six weeks.

Brisbane Heat coach next season. Announced in June 2018 that he would step down as chief executive, giving CA 12 months to find successor. Denied decision, after 17 years in the job, hastened by scandal. Announced he was leaving post as high performance manager in June 2018. Due to stay until after this year’s Ashes but left in wake of the damning review into Australian cricket. Resigned as CA chairman in November 2018, seven months after the ball-tampering scandal and in the wake of the independent review. proud to see one of their teams headbutt the line? I’d suggest that it doesn’t.”

To cultivate a culture of which their fans are proud, Langer has recruited former captains Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh to the coaching set-up. “We all know what’s the right thing to do and what’s not the right thing to do. We’ve just got to ensure we keep guiding these young blokes,” Langer says. “It’s about educating and mentoring these young cricketers to be good people and the best cricketers they can be.”

Throughout his 105-Test playing career, Langer played under “some amazing captains” – Allan Border, Mark Taylor, Waugh and Ponting. “Leadership is so pivotal to having a good culture,” he says. “I think in this day and age there’s so much scrutiny of people’s behaviour on and off the field. The players and coaches have to be aware of it.”

While Tim Paine lacks the playing pedigree of the captains Langer played under, he has been at the heart of the wider cultural rebuild in the side. Paine is no one’s idea of soft – he has often belied a fractured finger or thumb to play – but he has presented a different image as Test captain.

“I was certainly aware that the Australian public were, at times, upset or didn’t approve of the way they were going about it,” Paine told Cricket Australia’s website. “A lot of the changes we have made in the last 12 months have been little behavioural tweaks.”

An insider points to the way that Smith and Warner have been reintegrated, with Australia consciously managing their media commitments; while they do press conferences in the same way as the rest of the team, they have not done big set-piece one-on-one interviews in a way that puts the focus squarely on them.

A simple idea is at the core of Australia’s cultural renewal. “More important to this team than the charter was the values that we’re setting out to live every day,” Langer explains. “The most important step and the most important part of leadership is you’re on it every single day. If you let it slip for a second, it starts off a little chip and then it turns into a big crack and then things break.”

As Buchanan puts it: “Culture takes time to build and milliseconds or an Instagram post to destroy. Time will be the best judge of whether Australian cricket has really been able to turn its previous Titanic-like direction. Australian cricket and all those associated need to make sure they continue to stack session upon session, game upon game, series upon series, season upon season where their credibility, honesty and integrity cannot be challenged. Australians look to forgive as quickly as possible, but they do not forget.”

And so Australia’s cricketers are not merely striving to win the Ashes in England for the first time in 18 years. They are also continuing their broader fight for hearts and minds.