What's more, he fears another scandal will engulf the game unless the culture is fixed. "I don't care who does it," he said. "What I will say is that if it's not done, hang on to your hat and get ready for the next one."

McLean worked with the national team at the request of then coach Tim Nielsen in the wake of the 2007 retirements of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer. He had earned a certain reputation for having helped build Sydney's famous "Bloods" culture leading to the 2005 AFL premiership.

In his first few months he was required to confront a tempestuous Australia-India series at home that included the "Monkeygate" controversy between all-rounder Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh, the Indian spinner, as well as the ill-tempered Sydney Test match where umpiring decisions caused huge friction between the teams and the Australian team was savaged in the media.

He said he was called in to speak to the players in Perth immediately after the Sydney Test, and held a no-holds-barred review with the cooperation of captain Ricky Ponting, after which the Australian players made commitments to think before they acted, to understand the cultures of other competing countries and to accept the decisions of umpires.

McLean felt that it worked well, but within two years he had gone. "We never got to the stage where the key stakeholders could come together," he says. "There always seemed to be a crisis and that would bring them together forcibly. In a reactive way, you responded to the crisis."

Loading

He says now that the hierarchy in the team was "palpable" and that the younger players had no clue of what the team's culture was meant to be, other than a devotion to the baggy, green cap. Worse, he said there was no trust between employer and employees.

"The thing that was most apparent to me was that there was a divide between Cricket Australia and the team. That could've been managed. It didn't have to be a big event. It could've been used to move further forward."

In the 10 years since he first ventured into the Australian team environment, McLean says there have been numerous examples of crises after which there were opportunities lost; chances to fix the core problem. "Ball-tampering happened to be so public and there was a hullabaloo about it, but if you look what's behind it, look at the pecking order of the team, the lack of experience of the leaders, look at the relationship between the team and Cricket Australia, all those things ... I would've thought are still symptomatic of what's going on."

Loading

McLean said the highest priority for cricket's fix would be to repair the relationship between the players and the key stakeholders of the game. "That is board, whether they're open for it or not - and I suspect they're not - the key administrators and the players."

Cricket Australia's chairman David Peever stepped down this week under pressure over a consultants' report into the culture of the sport, which pointed the finger at the administration in the ball-tampering affair. The players' union has since stepped up a call to reinstate the suspended players - Steve Smith, Bancroft and David Warner - who are under a 12-month suspension from international cricket.