Cricket: Who replaces Steve Smith if Cricket Australia ditch their skipper?

In a short time, if Cricket Australia take the only logical course of action and ditch the skipper, the question then becomes: Who replaces Steve Smith?

CA chief executive James Sutherland was clearly in a highly emotional state as he delivered the initial verdict - "a very sad day for Australian cricket". They will take time before to cross all t's and dot i's, as they should, before bringing down the hammer, as they must, on Smith.

Taking another day or two while two highly-placed CA officials - head of integrity Iain Roy and head of team performance, former Wallaby Pat Howard - are on a fast flight to Cape Town to investigate further, is not unreasonable.

The players' actions - from the plot hatched by the leadership group down to the fixit guy on the ground Cam Bancroft - have cast a pall over the game. The outcry has been immediate and furious.

Sutherland was "extremely disappointed and shocked". He could scarcely be anything else.

So if you take out the leadership group as contenders who is left?

The LG have not been identified by name but their number will include vice captain David Warner, who seems to roll around the world's cricket stages with a can of petrol in his suitcase.

Seamer Josh Hazlewood perhaps? Batsman Usman Khawaja, allrounder Mitch Marsh or wicketkeeper Tim Paine - and this all pre-supposes none of them are in the LG.

Critics are calling this Australia's biggest cricket crisis since World Series Cricket, and Kerry Packer in 1977. The underarm ball at Melbourne in 1980-81? Forget it. That was, remember, unpalatable but legal.

The ramifications could be long and painful.

As long-time Australian cricket writer John Townsend put it: "Trevor Chappell been vilified for 37 years for doing something within the rules. Going to be a long 37 years for Steve Smith."

And this from senior cricket writer at the Brisbane Courier Mail Robert Craddock, who has covered the Australian team for 30 years: "Don't think for minute this was an isolated moment of madness ... it was a team with grubby standards finally descending into a world which was never far away. The coaches knew nothing? Really? What are they coaching for?"

Consider also that Australia's coach Darren Lehmann, whose role is sure to come under a harsh, unforgiving light, once called England seamer Stuart Broad out for "blatant cheating" for not walking. What goes round.

Smith's reaction when asked if he'd resign in the explosive post-day press conference in Cape Town was instructive too.

He clearly had no idea of the magnitude of what he had orchestrated. He was the right person to carry on leading Australia and had no intention of resigning, he said.

With that sort of enormous lack of appreciation of what he had overseen, Smith simply showed he is precisely the wrong type of person to be in charge.​

As Sutherland walked away from the press conference, two journalists engaged in a brief bout of push and shove along with a verbal exchange. Call it the trickle down effect.

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