The cricketing soap opera that followed the Sydney Test reached an unexpected finale when the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) announced that the India party would not return home early from Australia even if Harbhajan Singh is not cleared of racial abuse on appeal.

Sharad Pawar, the president of the board that temporarily suspended the tour last week after Harbhajan was banned for three Tests for allegedly calling Andrew Symonds a “monkey”, said on Saturday that “there was no question of a pullout”. For the BCCI, this represents a welcome climbdown.

The board’s retreat from an apparently entrenched position – Pawar had called Harbhajan’s ban “totally unacceptable” – has been matched for sheer improbability by Australia’s reaction to Anil Kumble’s contention that his team were the only ones to have played the Sydney Test in the true spirit of the game.

Australians like to consider themselves fair-minded, however deeply ingrained their will-to-win mentality is, and in the past week they have confronted an inconvenient truth. A majority have accepted that the national cricket team need to redefine themselves. Even more remarkably, the team are not distancing themselves from this notion. Ricky Ponting, the captain who led some distasteful on-field celebrations shortly after victory was achieved, has admitted that he would have done several things differently in hindsight.

Cricket Australia, conscious that its team, though a winning one, are not as popular as they ought to be, has recruited Ray McLean, a well-known motivational expert, to talk to the players and management on the Spirit of Cricket pact first introduced under Steve Waugh’s captaincy.

Nearly two thirds of respondents to an online poll in The Sydney Morning Heraldhad agreed that Ponting, as the symbol of the team’s boorish and arrogant image, should be removed as Australia’s captain. No more than 5 per cent were from India. The paper’s letters editor described what has become known here as “Bollyline” as the biggest single issue in recent memory. The story accounted for 16 of the Herald’s 20 most visited pages on its website last week. Even last night it was front-page news, as well as one of the first items on national television news programmes.

A contrite Michael Clarke was shown at the start of Channel Nine’s six o’clock news yesterday revealing that, after several days of trying, he had succeeded in getting through to Kumble on the phone to apologise for standing his ground after being caught at slip in the second innings in Sydney.

Clarke said that “the shock and disbelief” of getting out first ball had led him to stay and that Kumble had been supportive. Clarke infuriated the Indians by waiting to be given out. To compound their anger, he then claimed a slip catch the next day to dismiss Sourav Ganguly despite the batsman’s view that it didn’t carry. Ganguly went only because of a preseries agreement between the captains that the word of fielders would be taken in the event of low catches. That pact seems likely to be jettisoned by Kumble.

The India captain, whose attempts to persuade Ponting to solve the Harbhajan crisis privately were first revealed in The Times last week, had not spoken to his Australian counterpart since the match in Sydney before their scheduled clear-the-air meeting with Ranjan Madugalle, the ICC’s chief referee. A more enlightened leader, such as Waugh or Mark Taylor, would surely have approached Kumble for peace talks beforehand.

Ponting, whose parents received abusive phone calls last week, is bristling at criticism of being labelled a “dobber-in” for reporting Harbhajan to the umpires. In so doing, he opened a Pandora’s box that he can scarcely have envisaged. His claims that he was taking action against supposed racism have not resonated.

There are suggestions from the Indian camp that Harbhajan may have used the Hindi phrase “ teri maa ki” (an unpleasant reference to a person’s mother), which Ponting and Symonds construed to be “monkey”.

Harbhajan’s appeal in front of John Hansen, a New Zealand High Court judge, has yet to be fixed and appears likely to take place after the third Test in Perth, that starts on Wednesday. Brad Hogg’s hearing for calling Kumble and Mahendra Singh Dhoni “bastards” on the final day in Sydney will take place today at a hotel in Perth. If convicted, Hogg faces a ban of between two and four Tests.