Beer, it seems, does not mix with the Spirit of Cricket. Following the ill-mannered booing that accompanied Ricky Ponting, Australia’s captain, to the Edgbaston crease, England’s more partisan supporters have been told to sober up and calm down.

The Headingley West Stand’s tradition of hosting boorish behaviour has long had its Antipodean counterpart at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG). During the critical last test of the 1971 Ashes series, John Snow came under such sustained fire from beer cans and bottles thrown by Australians irate at his aggressive fast bowling that the whole England team, briefly, walked off the pitch in protest. As Athol Watkins, the SCG’s then curator, put it, “That crowd must have been mad. Half the cans they threw were still full.”

This was tame compared with the riot that broke out at the SCG, then called the Association Ground, in February 1879. An England touring team captained by Lord Harris was playing New South Wales when the home side’s star batsman, Billy Murdoch, was controversially given out. Rather than accept the decision, the New South Wales captain, Dave Gregory, refused to send in the next batsman unless Harris also agreed to have the umpire dismissed. As the two captains argued, thousands of angry spectators clambered over the low fencing and ran towards the middle.

Fearing the umpire was going to be lynched, Harris ran back to protect him. He was duly struck by a stick-wielding assailant who, in turn, was tackled by Harris’s teammate, A. N. “Monkey” Hornby. In the ensuing fracas Hornby was punched in the face and almost had his shirt ripped off his back.

“For some thirty minutes or more I was surrounded by a howling mob,” Harris reported. Three times the pitch was cleared and reoccupied, before play was finally resumed the next day, when the home side was skittled out for a paltry 49.

That ought to have been an end to it, but heated argument was reignited by a claim in the Sydney Morning Herald that “one of the English professionals made use of a grossly insulting remark to the crowd about their being nothing but ‘sons of convicts’ and this no doubt had something to do with their frenzied excitement, which arose all at once, and incited the crowd to acts of violence.”

Exception was also taken to Harris’s comments about being subjected to indignities “it distresses us to look back upon”. Refusing to play Australia in Sydney, his team moved on to the Melbourne Cricket Club. There, his hosts lost £6,000 on the event, in part because of the monumental bar bill racked up by the England players.

Booze, bad sportsmanship and national stereotyping — and all three years before the Ashes series even began.

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