EVEN before the eruption of the scandalous ball tampering by the Australian cricket team that has rocked the entire cricket world, I was intending to write about Australia’s malign influence on modern cricket. The trigger was an incident in their Test in South Africa the day before they confessed to surreptitiously scouring the ball with grit stuck on adhesive tape in an attempt to make it swing. Home spectators sledged the Australian players, especially batsman David Warner, who was confronted by a fan at the end of his innings.

So the biter was bitten. For Warner is a noted sledger, in a team that has virtually adopted this insult-throwing practice against opponents as a calculated part of their game. Darren Lehmann, the Australian coach, protested: “It’s been disgraceful. You’re talking about abuse of various players and their families. It’s not on at a cricket ground anywhere around the world, not just here.” Quite so. But with Australia the acknowledged Kings of Sledging his words ring a trifle hollow. The odious sledging chicken has come home to roost.

Regrettably, however, its route has taken it to wherever cricket is played, on grounds both humble and grand. As our English season starts, not a few leagues will be sending out their umpires armed with red cards, to deal with dissent and abuse.

The slide towards this melancholy moment was signalled back in 2001 when the MCC launched its annual Spirit of Cricket lecture (first speaker Richie Benaud). As long as the Spirit was alive and well there was no need for an annual medicinal lecture. In a book entitled The King of Games, published in 1936, the author reflected: “Cricket is a well-bred game. There is no room in it for anything but good manners.” He regretted the advent of what he called “barracking” – “where all that is objectionable in the loud-mouthed behaviour of the fans of baseball has been transported on to cricket’s fair and peaceful fields.”

And whose words were those? Not, as might be suspected, some romantic idealist, but Kent all-rounder Frank Woolley (1887-1938), recognised as one of England’s finest Test players of all time. Of his 64 Tests precisely half, including the first and last, were against Australia. He would hardly have characterised cricket as a game of “good manners” if he had encountered sledging, still less ball tampering.

In more recent (post-wars) years The Yorkshire Post’s distinguished cricket writer, Jim Kilburn wrote: “When ‘it isn’t cricket’ has become an anachronism and a smear cricket will be close to its deathbed.” You’ll find very few cricket followers who don’t believe it has reached that stage now.

THE row over the destruction of trees in Darlington is important for more than the loss of grace and beauty to a town that needs all it can get. The borough council – which means the councillors – must have known of the scale of the tree felling for its new housing development. The developers knew too, otherwise the chain-saw contractors would have arrived not knowing which trees to fell. And yet Darlington’s citizens did not know. Some slip up – or an awareness that revealing the clear-felling destined to take place might have threatened the entire scheme? “Leafy” suburbs are an asset. Darlington has wrecked one.