The Spirit of Cricket is Lost As Long As Sidebottom Snarls

The scene on the Surrey village green was much the same as it has been since a cricket club was first established there 175 years ago. Two teams, dressed in whites, were going about their business with a decorum that spoke, whether they were conscious of it or not, of an inherent respect for the spirit of the game. I happened to stop and watch as I cycled past the ground on which, quite a long time ago, I played my last serious cricket. On Sunday morning the players were two teams of under-11s and I wondered whether they in turn had been watching the telecast of the previous afternoon's play from the Test match at Trent Bridge, when Ryan Sidebottom gave an exhibition of the sort of behavior that is apparently threatening to poison the roots of the game.

The England bowler's confrontation with Jamie How, the New Zealand batsman, was a thing of snarls and sneers that seemed to go on for ever. Through a series of replays the Sky commentary team made sure, although they could not provide a transcription, that we did not miss its significance. Since England were already well on top in a match they were destined to win by an innings, such a rancorous outburst seemed so out of place as to be faintly ludicrous. The exchange belonged to another encounter altogether - and, indeed, it may have had its source in some earlier confrontation, although Sidebottom, who has inherited a choleric temperament from his father, appears to need little excuse to let fly.

His latest display came on the day that my colleague David Hopps, reporting from Trent Bridge, revealed the desire of the England and Wales Cricket Board to use Stuart Broad, Sidebottom's young team-mate with both England and Nottinghamshire, as a role model for the behavior of young players in order to rescue club cricket from, as Hopps put it, "near anarchy". Roughly 25 years after I called it a day, the fact that club cricket was in such a state came as an unpleasant surprise. And it seemed a sign of desperation that a 21-year-old bowler, only half a dozen matches into his Test career, should be expected to carry the burden of improving, by example, the behaviour of tens of thousands of weekend cricketers.

The editor of Wisden, in his current edition, uses fairly apocalyptic language to warn of the threat of violence within the game. He was writing, however, about first-class cricket and about the potential escalation of the kind of dispute that occurred between Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh during the Australia-India Test in Sydney in January. A graver problem appears to lie further down the game, where the increasing prevalence of on-field abuse is making it harder than ever to find people willing to stand as umpires.

Mike Gatting, now an ECB executive, has been asked to devise ways of reversing the declining standards of behavior at the lower levels. The choice of the former England captain is an interesting one. Presumably it is thought that a man who once stood in the middle of the pitch at Faisalabad exchanging insults with a Test umpire can provide insight into the motivation for such behavior.

Although a yellow-card system is being quietly tried out in a small group of private schools, Gatting may already have discovered that the problem is not among younger players but becomes evident at adult level, when there are league points at stake. Something similar has been evident in football, where mass brawls and assaults on referees are a phenomenon of matches between alleged grown-ups.

It is never a bad idea to set a good example to those just forming their impression of the way the game should be played but the problem needs to be attacked from both ends. There is evidence to suggest that Peter Moores, England's head coach, likes his players to have a bit of dog in them. It was, after all, Matt Prior's indifferent wicket-keeping rather than his incessant rabbiting from behind the stumps that cost him his place. But if Thames Ditton's under-11s are not to grow up into a bunch of habitual sledgers to whom a spell in the sin-bin is as familiar as a half-century or a five-for, then Gatting should make Moores aware of the responsibility he and his players - and not just the fresh-faced Broad - bear for the future of a game in which the reality now seems dismayingly at odds with the image.

Night riders light up the streets of London

Night racing is catching on, and not just in the floodlit slaloms on the slopes of Schladming and Sestriere, the ground-breaking night-time MotoGP race in Qatar three months ago and the formula one world championship round scheduled for the new, illuminated Singapore street circuit this September. On Saturday night many of Britain's top racing cyclists competed in the second annual Smithfield Nocturne on the streets surrounding the handsome 19th-century buildings of London's meat market, a spectacle witnessed by a crowd of impressive proportions.

On a tight 1km circuit, it was serious stuff and Geraint Thomas, still glowing from a 12th-place finish in the closing time-trial of the Giro d'Italia, won the main race, a criterium for elite riders. As night fell on a place where, more than 600 years ago, Richard II put on a jousting tournament, around 50 riders - including the Olympic medal winners Rob Hayles and Chris Newton - gave spectators a chance to see the sort of event absent from the streets of Britain since the demise of the Kellogg's city-center series in the 1980s.

Now the sponsors, Rapha clothing and Condor bikes, are spreading the magic. Another Nocturne is scheduled for Salford Quays on August 30 - a date that should make the evening an ideal homecoming party for Britain's Manchester-based Olympic road and track team.

Rovers should look beyond screen time

Pretend, for a moment, that you are John Williams, the chairman of Blackburn Rovers, preparing to appoint a new manager to replace the departed Mark Hughes. You have a straight choice between two men. The first of them progressed directly from his playing career into management, preserving the league status of a club who had been in last place, with a seven-point gap to their nearest rivals, when he took them over, before moving on to another League Two club with whom he secured promotion at the first time of asking. The second of the candidates ended his playing career at the same time but has spent the past two years on the golf course and in the Match of the Day studio. Which of these two, do you think, has shown the sort of ambition that deserves to be rewarded? The answer, of course, is Paul Ince.

A dark day on clay for Federer's champions

Roger Federer's pre-eminence on grass and hard courts is beyond dispute. But can a man who, while apparently in perfect health, commits so many unforced errors in a grand slam final as he did against the admittedly magnificent Rafael Nadal at the French Open on Sunday plausibly be described as "the greatest player the game has seen"? I think not.