In the home summer, ECB chairman Richard Thompson insisted that a white-ball tour of New Zealand was good preparation for the Ashes.

By the time the Ashes began, all of the top brass knew what had gone on with Brook in Wellington. The tourists had been 31-4 and actually did well to only lose by two wickets. Brook, the Test vice-captain, was out for six.

Should such details have been made public? Or, perhaps more importantly, should they have prompted a different approach to discipline? Coach Brendon McCullum had previously scrapped a midnight curfew which was in place on the England team.

The ECB will point to the fact that action was taken – and a “formal and confidential ECB disciplinary process”. Brook was fined around £30,000 and placed on a final warning for his future conduct.

The public apology only came after the Telegraph story – but we don’t know what contrition had been expressed internally.

When you look at it with hindsight, it is difficult not to try and piece it together with some of things that followed during the Ashes, whether they are connected or not.

And why does it matter? Because it means so much.

England fans had emptied their bank accounts to travel to Australia in the hope they might see an Ashes win.

Countless others flicked on the TV or radio in the middle of the night, ruining their Christmas sleep patterns to follow the calamitous cricket being played in a different hemisphere.

When they lost the first Test in Perth, inside two days and some of their players spent the resulting time off in the casino attached to their hotel.

The Ashes were lost in Adelaide where one player was out in a club without his team-mates or security until the early hours of the following morning.

Captain Ben Stokes asked for “empathy” in the aftermath of a video of Duckett, apparently drunk in Noosa, appearing on social media.

As for Noosa, quite how that holiday between the second and third Tests was allowed to go ahead in the aftermath of the Brook incident is staggering.

Even before the emergence of Brook’s misdemeanour, the excesses of Noosa were an abiding memory of this tour. That England players – including Brook – sat in bars for hours on end, in plain sight of the public and the media, beggars belief.

In fact, the ECB had announced just before Christmas that reports of players drinking excessively in Noosa would be investigated.

However director of cricket Rob Key denied there was a drinking culture within the squad – but made no mention of the New Zealand incident.

In his statement released on Thursday, Brook said he was “determined to learn” from his New Zealand mistake. Noosa perhaps suggested that was still an ongoing process.

Days after Noosa, when England played the crucial third Test in Adelaide, with the Ashes on the line and temperatures on the way to 40C, it was Brook who put down an edge off Usman Khawaja on the first morning.

The drop was just a small part of an Ashes tour where Brook was nowhere near his best on the field.

A return of 358 runs at an average of 39.77 in this series is respectable, but well below Brook’s career mark of almost 55. He is yet to make an Ashes century in 10 Tests.

Who knows if it is all connected – but he has put himself in a position of being closely scrutinised.