Simmering series that finally boiled over the top

From the first toxic exchange, this Test series threatened to boil over. Little did we know what would come next.

Darren Lehmann talks to his troops for the last time as coach at Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg yesterday

There’s bodies on the highway. Shattered glass and twisted panels. Groaning in the silence. Somebody sobbing. The creaking of hot metal in the cold morning.

And Steve Smith wasn’t at the Wanderers when the team arrived yesterday. Nor was David Warner. Cameron Bancroft’s place was empty.

Darren Lehmann will be gone in a few days and most of those who are here are in body only. Training sessions have been ­cancelled. Motions gone through in a distracted daze.

The day before the Test, when the main training session for a Test match whose result could change history (South Africa hasn’t won a series at home against Australia since readmission), nobody in the Australian camp could find a f..k to give. Pardon the language but these past few days would have a saint swearing like a sailor.

Or a slipper.

Instead of training Smith embraced his replacement, Tim Paine, and walked from the lobby determined to face his public shame. Paine cried as he left. Smith had a lot more crying too do. Lehmann too. Bancroft, bizarre as ever, shadow batted, watching his reflection in the glass near the lift.

There’s barely a dry eye in the (shit) house. Apologies again.

They’d screwed those bolts on too tight. Wound themselves up until they strip threaded sense. It had already been a long summer. An Ashes series can drain a man. They hit the country, a bursting ball of intensity and played with such ferocity they seared the grass at Durban in that first Test. Mitchell Starc destroyed the Proteas, swung the old ball viciously.

And there you could here the first toxic exchange. “You’re tampering with the ball,” AB de Villiers told David Warner. “Are you calling me a cheat?” Warner was at the South African on the same subject. They were both suspicious of how much the Kookaburra, a conservative ball, was “going”. Both sides were doing it earlier than the other thought they should have.

Both sides thought the other was up so something.

The Australians walk onto the pitch with a flag of Australia ahead of the day one of the fourth cricket Test match against South Africa.

Even as they were winning the first wheel on the Australian car was starting to wobble. By the ­second Test they were all going, it was shaking like a bastard. (Last one, I promise) Hard to steer and hurtling down a mountain road. Rocks started to tear metal on bends. Sparks flew.

The scratches became gouges became gaping wounds.

Where was Warner’s head at? Something was going on. The Bull was back in the paddock and he was pawing at the ground, steaming with rage, charging in a red mist.

It was there for all to see in that hysterical, angry celebration of de Villiers run out. It was more fitting of a cage fighter than a cricketer, but Warner wasn’t the only one who’d got so damned het up they’d lost direction.

Nathan Lyon dropped the ball on the prostrate batsman. Not nice Garry. He’d dropped the ball in more ways than one, but there’s a core there. He knows north from south. At least he apologised.

The sat nav was giving up. The moral compass was working as good as those cheap ones that somebody thought would be a good idea to put in school shoes all those years back.

At school bad things happened behind the dunnies. Durries were smoked. Prearranged fights ­rumbled until the pack of braying spectators attracted an adult. They weren’t quite behind the dunnies when the fight broke out.

In the second innings all but three South African batsman were out in single figures. At 4-49 they were in trouble chasing Australia’s pale 227. Theunis de Bruyn hung around and they were 5-139, still not a great spot with Mitchell Starc expected to go through the tail like he’d done all summer in England and just the week before. He ­appeared an unstoppable force. Then the out of form Quinton de Kock escaped a few early chances and the home side started to edge, sorry, its way back into the match.

And the series.

South African batsman Dean Elgar leaves the field after being dismissed by Nathan Lyon for 19 runs on day one.

Markram made a century, de Kock just kept hanging around. The Bull started pawing the ground, pouring scorn and invective on the South African who is a tool that’s never been that familiar with the sharpening stone.

The stairwell between the dressing rooms was the closest thing to the back of the dunnies. The instigator became the ­instigated. The baiter took the bait. The plot was lost. Only momentarily it seemed. It would turn up, things always do. Pray to Saint ­Anthony. The Test was lost too.

Warner wouldn’t, couldn’t calm down. South African cricket officials joined the pathetic taunting of him and his wife. They played him like a matador plays its prey. They lanced him and they teased him and they held out the red cape.

He was the victim here, but ­victimhood didn’t become him. Didn’t fit the model. Sympathy for the Bull? Maybe not a man of taste, but one who’d been around a long time. He would not apologise about the nature of his game.

They were playing ugly and they were not going to resile from it. That’s the way we play our Test cricket, the captain and the coach said. It was a mantra we were all used to but were all tiring of.

The series was level and simmering. No, scrub that. It was a smoking, seething cess pit of allegation and recrimination.

The Australian bus couldn’t be controlled now. A wheel was off and the axle was dragging. Some passengers were looking to kick out the back window, hoping they could hurl themselves out.

Teammates restrain David Warner as the team breaks for tea on day four.

Bancroft nailed it when he said he panicked and shoved the sandpaper down his pants. Panic was a virus. They were losing the Cape Town Test on that Saturday and the series as surely as they’d lost the plot. Warner held his woodwork class in a room somewhere. The “findings” of Cricket Australia’s hasty inquiry suggest Smith apparently didn’t have the strength to intervene.

They were still panicking when Smith and Bancroft made a solemn march across the Newlands ground toward the press box which is on the opposite side from the dressing rooms. They wanted to tell the truth and made a fair ­approximation of it. You could almost think the truth of what they’d done to themselves and their reputations and their team mates and the game and their friends and their families and their lives was just too big to comprehend.

The survivors have lost skin and blood. They’re surveying the scene. The bus has careered through a series of corporate billboards. Taken out pedestrians. There’s the distant wailing of ­sirens but they’ve made hasty ­repairs to the team bus and they’re getting back on board but there’s no getting those dents out.