The second Ashes Test will start at Lord's tomorrow in a fog of acrimony after the final day fall-out at Cardiff, which started with Kevin Pietersen squaring up to Mitchell Johnson and ended with barbs flying over 'Glovegate'. The two sides have been keen to defuse the tensions over the opening Test. But they need not: such hostility is a staple of Test cricket.
That is the verdict of Rod Marsh, the former Australia wicket-keeper, who was later the director of England's national academy. "There will be times in a contest between any two teams, whether it be football, cricket or tiddlywinks. If you have two competitive teams, that things will happen on the field of play," said Marsh, who is the director of the ICC Global Cricket Academy in Dubai. "For some reason everyone wants everyone else to be a goody two-shoes these days. You still have to have your characters in the side.
"People are universally worried about Test cricket, but I'll tell you what will happen to Test cricket: if you take out all the characters, it will die. "It is frightening to think we are trying to sterilise everybody. People should be allowed to express themselves. "Yes, there is a line that you can't cross, but sometimes you need to give a bit of latitude to that line and be flexible in what happens. I like competition and like to think that people should be able to compete, and if a bad word is applied here or there, then so be it."
Since England escaped from Cardiff with a draw on Sunday, the Australian captain Ricky Ponting has been chastised for muck-raking, after suggesting the hosts had employed "pretty ordinary" delaying tactics in the final overs of the opening Test. His critics have been quick to claim he is precariously placed to preach on the Spirit of Cricket, suggesting he was lucky to avoid a reprimand for his own actions earlier in the session.
The Tasmanian batsman claimed a bat-pad catch off England's hero, Paul Collingwood, which replays showed missed his bat, and advanced at the umpire, Aleem Dar, imploring the catch be given. Duncan Fletcher, the former England coach who fell foul of Ponting during the 2005 Ashes, was more damning. "If any side in the world doesn't play within the spirit of the game it's Ponting's Australians, yet here he is sitting in judgment on England because he's frustrated that his bowlers failed to complete the job," he wrote in his newspaper column.
"If the batsmen had wasted the same amount of time talking between overs, no one would have batted an eyelid. "Instead we're left with the ridiculous situation of being told off by an Australian captain for transgressing cricket's spirit - a notion he seems to only vaguely understand himself." Marsh, who deemed Ponting the best young player he had seen when he coached him as a teenager at Australia's national academy, defended his former charge though. "You wonder how the game ever survived this long," he added. "Maybe it wouldn't if it is going to become this sterile.
"I have trouble reading all the stuff you read about it now. With some of the stuff that I have read over the last couple of days, it concerns me that Ricky Ponting is being painted as an ogre, for saying what he said. "He played well, Australia had the better of 95 per cent of the Test match, and yet all of a sudden he is an ogre." pradley@thenational.ae
