MAKE no mistake, this is a difficult time to be a wrestler. Which not many of us are, I admit, except inadvertently and on trains during the busier periods. But even those of us who rarely know the thrill of squashing a large man from Uzbekistan into a rubber mat can feel a wind of change blowing through this most ancient and storied of sports.

Better that, you might say, than feeling a wind of change blowing through a large man from Uzbekistan while you are squashing him into a rubber mat. But even so, let’s not downplay the awkwardness of this potentially pivotal moment in wrestling’s history.

The World Championships are under way in Budapest — or, if you can’t get there, on British Eurosport — where the smooth process of the competition has been complicated by the imposition from on high of a broad raft of rule changes, designed, according to Syd Hoare, Eurosport’s helpful commentator, “to produce more spectacular wrestling for the media and the public”.

We should point out directly that we’re talking here about old-fashioned, unscripted, Olympic wrestling and not its silicon-enhanced, American-import bastard offspring, in which, if anything, a little less spectacle might be appreciated. Report for duty in Budapest in a studded leather jacket and wearing make-up to a depth of four inches and you will find yourself back in a taxi before you can say “The Rock sucks.”

To repeat Hoare’s compelling summary, real wrestling requires athletes in possession of “the strength of a weightlifter, the speed of a sprinter and the cunning of a chess master”. We should note, too, that this separates Olympic wrestling from the ring-based version seen on ITV’s World of Sport in the 1970s, which was royal fun in its own way, but wherein the fighters tended to have the speed of a chess master, the strength of a sprinter and the cunning of a weightlifter’s less clever brother.

To confirm further the distinction, in real wrestling a fighter may be in grave difficulty — suffering a “gut-wrench” or “getting his leg pushed up behind his buttocks”, which, let’s face it, is exactly the opposite direction in which God intended legs to go. But at no point will that fighter be seen slapping the canvas, the means by which the likes of Kendo Nagasaki reported agony to a gullible nation in the golden age of Dickie Davies. Also, in keeping with our more security-conscious times, the possibility of getting battered about the head by the handbag of an encroaching spinster has been entirely removed by more carefully structured stewarding.

All well and good. But in a culture that welcomes, and expects, constant stimulation of an ever more condensed and intensified kind — the iPod, the portable PlayStation, the upcoming third series of Strictly Come Dancing with Darren Gough, to name only those — wrestling has been left looking a little bereft in the entertainment department.

The ancient Greeks might have gone a bomb on the sight of one man getting another man’s back on the ground without punching him (“exposing the back to the mat”, to use the technical term), but now even the wrestling authorities have been forced reluctantly to admit that those days are gone.

Hence this new package of rule changes. According to Hoare, the sport is “moving a bit in the direction of judo, with the emphasis on throws”. In accordance with the global depletion of patience levels, bouts are shorter — down to two minutes from three. There are greater rewards for “the grand amplitude throws”, whatever those may be.

“Hopefully it’s getting clear to you,” Hoare said, although I imagine I wasn’t the only viewer for whom this was the point, metaphorically speaking, at which the sky of understanding permanently darkened as the big man from Uzbekistan finally rose from the floor and sat down on my face.

All credit to Hoare, whose description of this week’s pictures from Budapest as “non-stop muscular endurance action” was as brilliantly optimistic a piece of summarising as one will hear all year. But he is beset by the age-old Eurosport problem of apparently not being in any kind of contact with the producers of the images on which he is required to commentate. Like the Ukrainian in the bronze-medal freestyle bout in the under-66kg category, Hoare has just got to lie there with his legs in a knot and take it.

At one point we launched without preliminary into a match that Hoare felt able to categorise swiftly, if vaguely, as “the Korean fighter against the Azerbaijan fighter”. Closer inspection, however, revealed that we were watching a Mongolian taking on an Iranian.

However, that kind of thing is a mere detail beside an early problem with the revised regulations; namely, that they don’t seem to work. By day two, Hoare had been obliged to issue the following disappointing admission: “Despite the new rules, the wrestling is looking much the same.”

This is no time to despair, though. The sport can still grow. We saw a single leg attack; what about encouraging more double leg attacks? Better still, incentivise the triple leg attack. That, surely, is something people would pay to see.