How the rest of this Australia tour goes is immaterial but the atmosphere around the next one, if it is played so soon, will be pure poison. The cricketers may move on but India won’t forget. Corporate wolves will howl, the excitable in the media will put a sports contest ahead of news of the deaths of soldiers and farmers; there will be headlines of quasi-war, ‘vengeance’ and the ‘battle for honour’.

The central tenet of Harbhajan's case is that he was disgracefully rude to a fellow cricketer's mother. The whole cricketing world seems to be united in the view this as such a minor infraction it can be viewed as a positive. No monkeys. Only mothers. All good. In fact, every one of them connected with the case, from ICC chief executive Malcolm Speed to the lip-happy bowler himself, should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. And one can only hope their mothers let them know so at the earliest opportunity.