Few adages are more blatantly fallacious than the old refrain that tells us all bullies are cowards at heart. Many are, of course, but for some the aggression and the urge to dominate maliciously are such raging constants in their natures that they would shout threats down the barrels of a firing squad.

It is only in second-rate fiction that bold confrontation is guaranteed to make the bully dissolve into a puddle of insecurity. Yet, obviously, the tendency to hound and abuse others is most likely to flourish when the prospect of retribution is minimal. And those are certainly the circumstances that encouraged the sledging controversy now engulfing the Indian cricket team’s tour of Australia and spreading anxiety about standards of sportsmanship to every country involved in the game.

The specifics of the eruption of venomous hostility between the Indians and the Australians are fraught with complexity, and it would be insanely presumptuous to seek to unravel the tangle of conflicting allegations from half a world away, but a distant onlooker is entitled to pose a few simple questions. Firstly, how can so many of the tough guys of cricket go on persuading themselves that taunting and deriding opponents on the field with the crudest, most hurtfully personal insults they can muster is a legitimate expression of hard-nosed professionalism when in reality the mildest condemnation demanded by such conduct is that it is a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy? What could be more hypocritical than mutilating the recognised tenets of fair play in sport while sheltering within the comfort of its conventions?

Not long ago Steve Waugh, the former Australian captain who apparently revelled in his countrymen’s unchallengeable status as the masters of sledging, justified the practice as the permissibly ruthless pursuit of “mental disintegration” in the opposition. But didn’t it bother him that, in another setting, subjecting somebody to the same foul-mouthed nastiness might have resulted in the disintegration of a jaw-bone? That was the kind of possibility mooted by Geoffrey Boycott, himself a favourite target of Aussie sledging in his time, when he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Thursday: “If a comment is unacceptable in a pub, and would earn you a fist in the face, then it’s unacceptable on a playing field.” Especially, it may be added, in what (notwithstanding the hazards of facing fast bowling) is essentially a noncontact sport.

At least the prefight trash-talking of boxers, wearying and odious though it is, comes from men who know the recipients of their slights will soon be trying to pummel a riposte into their skulls. The worst the sledger need fear is that his opponent will respond with words more vile than he can summon. To regard such sewage as representing competitive abrasiveness is a small miracle of self-delusion and there is relief in finding that the Australian public have tired of their players’ antics.

Newspaper broadsides and overwhelmingly damning polls have demonstrated to Ricky Ponting and those under his captaincy that achieving historic success (after beating India in Sydney last weekend in the match that precipitated the present crisis, they are just one win short of a record-breaking total of 17 consecutive Test victories) isn’t enough to fend off searing criticism of their readiness to behave, according to one influential journalist, like “a pack of wild dogs”. If that was a somewhat fevered description, the general message seemed to be that a proud nation wants its cricketers to compete fiercely but honourably rather than as a bunch of caricatures of macho amorality.

Ponting was berated by his own people for failing to see that the dubious example he had set cast doubt on his right in the Sydney Test to run to the authorities to report a racist insult allegedly inflicted on a member of his team. His complaint was that Harbhajan Singh had called Andrew Symonds “a monkey” and the official reaction was a three-Test ban for Harbhajan, which so infuriated the Indians that they threatened to terminate their tour. If Harbhajan was guilty of the remark attributed to him, its effect on Symonds, who is of mixed descent, was bound to be intensified by memories of Australia’s recent one-day series in India, where he was frequently the victim of monkey chants and gestures from the crowds.

But the miserable saga was given an additional, outlandish twist late last week when sources close to the Indian camp were credited with suggesting that their banned off-spinner had been misheard, that he was innocent of calling Symonds a monkey. He had merely used a Hindi word that is a derogatory reference to a person’s mother. That struck many of us as a peculiar attempt at vindication but, however implausible the tale may be, it does have relevance to one or two more of those questions mentioned earlier. Everybody accepts that history imparts a uniquely sinister resonance to racist insults but are there no other forms of verbal offensiveness that cricket is prepared to take seriously? Is it tolerable that efforts to undermine an adversary’s concentration are liable to include lurid (usually sexual) defamation of his wife, his mother and anybody else connected with him?

The problem is by no means confined to Australians. It is a worldwide plague. But perhaps what happened in Sydney, and the aftermath, will help the sledgers to realise belatedly that it is not the behaviour of self-respecting men to disrespect others as much as they do.

Big Sam suffers but not at bank

For several reasons, my heart found it easy to remain unwrung at the sight of Sam Allardyce’s removal from Newcastle United. Sympathy for any manager cut adrift by a major football club these days is, of course, automatically limited, since he is likely to be floating on a raft of banknotes towards a secure financial future. Allardyce’s severance package is estimated to be as much as £6m, a sum that should make more bearable his sense of injustice at finding himself unwanted after only 24 matches in charge of the perennial underachievers of the northeast. And there seems to me no cause for grieving over the effect on his pride and his reputation, since both were probably in need of adjustment.

He deserved credit for consistently giving Bolton Wanderers respectable placings in the Premier League during nearly eight years at the Reebok stadium but the record was achieved with football that was pragmatic bordering on primitive. It represented an acceptable ends-justifying-the-means formula for Bolton but it hardly warranted the increasing signs from Allardyce of a conviction that his methods (incorporating a huge backroom staff and heavy reliance on the appliance of science) would put him ahead of the game wherever he managed.

There was a confident swagger about his candidacy for the England job after the departure of Sven-Göran Eriksson and, once he and the egregious Freddy Shepherd had somehow convinced themselves he was the right man to create a miraculous revival at St James’ Park, he rode into Newcastle last May on a small gale of self-belief. He even believed himself capable of rescuing the undoubted talent of Joey Barton from the swamp of the player’s recidivist delinquency. It was perhaps the worst of a clutch of mistakes that added to the horrors of a nightmare assignment.

Maybe now Big Sam and everybody else in football will have a clearer perspective about his abilities and where they might best be deployed.

Great man, bad bet

Apparently the greatness of Tiger Woods dazzles the betting public as much as it does his opponents on the golf course. There has been a clamour to punt on Woods’s chance of using the 2008 season to become the first man to complete the Grand Slam of the four major championships.

He has, of course, already had simultaneous possession of all four titles (The Masters, the US Open, The Open and the USPGA championship) but not in the same calendar year. Now there is widespread belief that the courses hosting the 2008 majors will suit him decisively and it has translated into some irrational wagering.

The first bet struck with Ladbrokes was £500 last September at the fairish, if hardly irresistible, odds of 50-1 but since then money has been piled on so eagerly at shrinking prices that the firm currently quote a deliberately prohibitive 20-1. Consider two facts: a) if Tiger started as short as 6-4 for each of the majors, the cumulative value would be 38-1; b) if illness or anything else causes Tiger to miss a major, ante-post rules apply and stakes are lost. Anybody who shows interest in betting at 20-1 should be barricaded into a cave until late autumn.