Two captains, two very fine cricketers, Andrew Strauss and Ricky Ponting, are accusing each other of not playing according to the “spirit of the game”. Hopefully, they know what they are saying because I don’t and I don’t think anybody does. In truth, they sound as believable, as credible, as a starlet saying she did a nude scene because the “script demanded it”.

We’ve been talking about this spirit of cricket thing for as long as I can remember. Every captain, when pushed into a corner, comes up with it. And yet, everybody, with no exception, violates one of the key clauses in the MCC’s spirit of cricket declaration which the ICC has adopted. Point 5 says it is against the spirit of the game to “indulge in cheating or any sharp practice, for instance:

(a) to appeal knowing that the batsman is not out.”

You probably see it twice every hour. In the Lord’s Test one of the Australian batsmen while swaying away missed the ball by at least eight inches and it clipped the helmet on the way. Straightaway Matt Prior went up, you’d expect that, but so did Andrew Strauss at slip. Now if there were two people on the ground who knew for certain it wasn’t an edge they were Prior and Strauss. Yet they were appealing vehemently for a catch and, by the sheer act of doing so, trying their best to induce an error from the umpire.

Ricky Ponting probably does it a couple of times a day himself and I’m not sure there is a player in world cricket who hasn’t appealed convincingly knowing the batsman wasn’t out. And yet at the end of the first Test, Ponting told the media “We came to play by the rules and the spirit of the game. It’s up to them to do what they want to do”. It staggers me. The spirit of the game is now merely a stick to beat people with and I’m afraid anyone who believes otherwise is being naive.

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