Steve Waugh called sledging ‘mental disintegration’

The present row in cricket has been brewing for nearly 50 years. Ever since sledging became widespread, it was always going to escalate to a point when two teams could no longer bear to be on the same pitch and the whole structure of cricket would totter.

The gloriously ironical part is that it is the Australians who are swooning like virgins and saying that sledging has gone too far. This from the nation which invented sledging, this from the nation which gloried in sledging, this from the nation which believed that sledging was irrefragable proof of national machismo.

It was Australia who coined the term sledging — meaning a remark of sledgehammer subtlety — and it was Australia who dignified it, with the declaration by Steve Waugh, the captain from 1999 to 2004, that sledging was “mental disintegration.”

Sledging is part of the game, Australians say. That’s true, just as kicking people in the shins is part of football and punching people in the nose is part of rugby. Both these acts are punished. But sledging has been out of control for years.

What’s said on the pitch stays on the pitch. It’s all part of a man’s code. Anyone who complains is a poofter. Thus, Australia brought this childish practice of sledging into cricket, with the result that all the other international teams feel obliged to do the same.

Last summer, England players threw jellybeans on to the pitch to insult Zaheer Khan. I mean, how pathetic is that? India were furious about that, too.

Australia led the way in insults and now, claiming that an India player used a racist term, they are saying that rude behaviour on a cricket pitch is terrible, rotten, awful, mustn’t be allowed. If Harbhajan Singh did call Andrew Symonds a monkey as a racist insult, it is pretty nasty. As nasty as when Darren Lehmann called the Sri Lankans “black c***s.” Many Australians defended Lehmann’s outburst because it was “in the heat of the moment”. The reason the row has got out of hand is not because of racism. It is because too soft a line has been taken on the practice of sledging for far too long.

No one in authority wanted to be seen to be picking on the Australians; none of the players wanted to complain because he would look soft.

Australia has long promoted mental disintegration; as a result, we are facing the disintegration of cricket.