Let's Go Sledging

If Ricky Ponting and Andrew Strauss were boxers and the first day of the current test was a fight, then the Australian captain‘s flouncing complaints about the English sledging would be equivalent to moaning that “things had got a bit physical” in the ring, or “someone might get hurt”. Sledging is now an integral part of the game. The Australians invented it, the laws were codified by the Marquess of Stevewaugh in the late 1990s. There are degree courses offered in it. They teach it in schools to try to get the kids off the streets where the more brutal and unsupervised forms of sledging can lead to serious mental disintegration. The children are taught that the only boundaries that exist in sledging concerns insults regarding an opponent’s mother, wife or sister. Anything other than that is allowed, or ‘fair dinkum’ to use the correct jargon.

Doug Bollinger is the current poster boy of the Australian sledging movement. His whole whitewashed face is one big sledge against humanity. It is the only reason he has been selected. It definitely isn’t for his bowling.

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