The incident almost cost the opener his nascent Test captaincy career. TV pictures showed him taking dirt from his pocket and putting it on the ball, an act assumed to be an attempt to rough it the ball and make it suitable for reverse swing.

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However, Gough, a known exponent of reverse swing, said that while Atherton was naïve in his actions, he was merely attempting to keep the ball dry rather than engaging in subterfuge.

“I was bowling when he did that, me and Ian Salisbury,” Gough said on the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast. “For someone who’s educated as well as Michael Atherton, there’s all for keeping the ball dry, which we’d all planned to do that day, but putting dirt on the ball, sprinkling it on the ball, what did he think we were going to do, grow plants out of it? What was he thinking?

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“The idea was, you see spinners do it all the time, they put their hand onto the crease and they keep the ball dry, that would be the way to do it. That’s what Salisbury was doing. I was at the other end, getting a bit of reverse at Lord’s against South Africa, and he was there sprinkling dirt on it. Innocence, total innocence from Atherton, he didn’t know what he was doing.”