How to Put a Real Man Off His Swing

A key stage in the male menopause of sports-loving men is the realisation, at around 40, that they will never represent their country at football or cricket. While career and physique have made the call objectively unlikely some years before, the shock of actually being older than even David Seaman and Alex Stewart brutually confirms that the selectors are looking elsewhere.

This makes us tough on those who, offered the chance, reject it. Graham Thorpe's withdrawal from the England cricket party to tour Australia - because his mind is distracted by divorce and a custody dispute involving his children - seems self-indulgent. Few people in such sad circumstances are able to give up their jobs.

However, former captain Mike Gatting wrote an article in support of Thorpe. Every time he walked to the wicket in Australia, Gatting suggested, Aussie fielders would ask "How are the kids, Thorpey?" or inquire what the former Mrs Thorpe was doing to keep herself warm these nights.

Although followers of cricket know about "sledging" - the verbal abuse of batsmen, pioneered by Australian teams - I was still shocked by the idea that the comments would be quite so cruelly targeted. But Gatting, who lost the England captaincy after an incident with a barmaid, is in a position to know what kind of topical commentary might follow.

Coincidentally, a report from the Ryder Cup, which started yesterday, warned of the spread of "silent sledging" in golf. Because speaking to opponents is discouraged, this apparently involves strategic coughing during a putt, moving so that your shadow falls across the green, or rattling change in a pocket. Perhaps Thorpe should switch disciplines to golf, where the most an opponent could do is take out a photo of a happy family occasion as the players moved between holes.

Given that even those who love sport essentially know that it's now played at the top level mainly by self-obsessed money-grubbers, it's odd that such gamesmanship - verbal or silent - still seems shocking. But it does. Even in contemporary cricket, would fielders really scratch an estranged father's private anguish to get his wicket?

My guess is that the green-capped fielders would pick more on Thorpe's wife than his kids. Because what's most interesting about sledging in cricket is that it touches on the dirty psychological secret that lies beneath a lot of sports careers: the terror of sexual inadequacy and, especially, of homosexuality. Those who play games of public physical prowess seem unusually insecure that their private athleticism might not match it.

Reading cricketers' memoirs, there's little sense that the Australian fielders are going to be dislodging Oscar Wilde from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The 70s teams that pioneered sledging seem to have favoured variations on "who was your wife with last night?" or "who was that guy I saw you with in town?" In other words, the ancient male smears of cuckoldry and queerness. What's astonishing is that a successful sportsman could be so insecure in his sexuality that it seemed a reasonable calculation that such insults would make him unable to bat.

Beyond that, much of the talking back is simply swearing. Merv Hughes, the huge mustachioed Aussie pace-bowler, once yelled at the England batsman Robin Smith: "You can't fucking bat!" Smith, after pulling him for four next ball, called back: "Quite a pair, aren't we? I can't fucking bat and you can't fucking bowl."

This seems the best way to deal with sledging, although Smith was South African by birth and this might be significant. You would think the smart move would be for Thorpe and the others to wonder aloud if any of the home team's ladies might be at a barbie with a Bruce or even a Barbara. If this doesn't happen, then it suggests that another hidden undercurrent in sport is that the English feel sexually inferior to the Australians.

In football there's relatively little sledging, for the nasty rather than nice reason that the pace and nature of the game make it easier simply to kick your enemies or squeeze their testicles while marking them at corners. As amateur lip-readers watching football on television know, most talking during the sport consists of players bemoaning their luck by snarling a rhyme for it.

Revealingly, the best-known incident of verbal unsettling in the Premiership involved a gay imputation. Robbie Fowler, then of Liverpool, falsely questioned the heterosexuality of the Chelsea defender Graeme Le Saux, who was apparently the subject of crude rumour in football dressing rooms because he read the Guardian.

That game's real sledging comes from the spectators. There is no other profession in which a man clinging on to his job - as the Sunderland manager Peter Reid currently is - would have to endure tens of thousands of people singing "Cheer up, Peter Reid" to the tune of "Daydream Believer". Similarly, there have been greater celebrities than David Beckham but other varieties of fame exclude a vast nicotine-throated choir inquiring about your wife's favoured sexual position.

If Graham Thorpe really was forced off the plane to Australia by the fear of forward short-leg alluding to custody disputes, then he ought perhaps to think of Beckham and imagine a stadium-strong male choir asking: "Does she take it up the arse?" Worried that sledging isn't cricket, Thorpe should probably be glad it's not football.

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