Until an anti-banality drug is discovered, not a lot can be done about the indefatigable throng of connoisseurs of the obvious who are forever telling us there’s always been skulduggery in sport. But when they add that only the pitifully naïve could possibly become worked up over the current prevalence of cheating scandals, patience is difficult to sustain. Then it’s time to point out that perhaps if they paid more attention to what other people were actually saying their own worldly wisdom might not be quite such a heavy cross to bear.

They might realise that those of us who are less shrug-the-shoulders philosophical than they are about the toxic values now pervading many areas of sport aren’t hopelessly blinkered romantics unable to recognise that the temptation to cheat must be nearly as old as the instinct to play. Of course there’s nothing new in the willingness to be villainous. It’s the reaction to major wrongdoing that threatens to set this era apart. Sometimes sport appears to drift dangerously close to a policy of zero intolerance, to operating as if no behaviour can be sufficiently heinous to warrant unmitigated condemnation and its concomitant punishments. Anybody who doesn’t suspect that kind of thinking is already establishing a few beachheads has been determinedly ignoring the evidence.

Once Flavio Briatore was found guilty of masterminding a potentially lethal scheme to gain a race-winning advantage for the Renault team at last season’s Singapore Grand Prix by instructing Nelson Piquet Jr to crash his car into a barrier, Briatore’s permanent banishment from Formula One seemed automatic and when motorsport’s governing body, the FIA, imposed penalties encompassing that effect the main complaint most observers had with the verdict was its craven failure to apply any worthwhile sanction to Renault as an organisation. However, the affront to justice implicit in the leniency shown to the team will be dwarfed if there proves to be a vestige of the prophetic in comments made last week by the most influential figure in Formula One, the commercial rights controller Bernie Ecclestone.

Though he was a member of the commission that sat in judgment of Briatore, Ecclestone blithely described the ban on the Italian as harsh and specified a one-year exile as a more appropriate punishment for an offence involving serious hazard for Piquet, fellow drivers and the spectators. That the remarks were reported in the build-up to today’s staging of the Singapore Grand Prix gave them an extra dimension of unreality. And F1’s little caesar went further towards an ethical fantasyland by suggesting the most questionable element of Briatore’s sentence was that barring him from functioning as a manager of drivers. Sure, Bernie, where should a lad revealing promise at the wheel look for help but to a man whose concept of career guidance sent one client hurtling straight into a concrete wall?

Some will argue that broad conclusions can never be drawn from happenings in Formula One, since it barely qualifies as a sport. But lovers of rugby see theirs as the sport of sports, yet it has produced a catalogue of depressing sleaziness in the tale of deceit and betrayal of all principles of fair play at Harlequins. Yes that tale, the one so many in the old game aggressively insist we should be drawing a line under. Meeting their demand would be easier if they didn’t strive so feverishly to minimise the moral implications of the string of offences that began with the faking of a blood injury (as part of an illegal ploy meant to bring victory in a Heineken Cup quarter-final) by the Harlequins wing Tom Williams.

The refusal to acknowledge the gravity of the episode is typified by the continuing efforts to persuade us that a three-year ban from rugby was draconian punishment for Dean Richards. Though Richards orchestrated the outrageous cheating and subsequent cover-up, his lawyer, Mark Gay, has gone on record with the view that the treatment Quins’ former director of rugby received at the hands of his judges was “savage and excessive”.

Gay identifies feigning injury as the “core offence” but it wasn’t in Richards’s case. He didn’t feign injury. He feigned honesty and sportsmanship. Feigning injury was no more the core offence in what he did than is wearing a mask in an attempted bank robbery. Richards engaged in a larcenous enterprise, a scam to steal a result, and then sought strenuously to conceal his guilt. If that’s a minor misdemeanour, rugby’s code of honour doesn’t count for much.

Admittedly, flourishing codes of honour aren’t especially conspicuous across the spectrum of sport these days. The old notion of sport as a realm of invented dramas in which it’s natural to maintain a higher standard of conduct than might be found in the real world outside is inevitably withering a little more every day. Obviously, for intensely committed professionals the arena is the real world and it’s a place where nobody can expect the faintest echo of Corinthianism. But honesty, a decent measure of respect for competitors, a resistance to outright cheating, shouldn’t be too much to ask. Does belief in sportsmanship have to be regarded almost as a badge of wimpishness, as it so often appears to be in the biggest sport of all, football? It is off the field that the game reaches its worst depths of disreputability, as in the acceptance of club owners with yard-dog pedigrees and in the darkly dubious activities surrounding the recruitment of boy players and many other transfers. But on the pitch, too, chicanery is rampant. Diving, wrestlemania in the penalty box and efforts to have opponents ordered off are only a few of the ugly practices eliciting a grossly inadequate response from the disciplinary authorities.

Even occasional readers of this column are liable to know the orgy of manhandling that precedes every free-kick and corner is a particular hate of mine. That definitely is a comparatively new form of cheating, something never seen a few decades ago. And there again the sinister spectre of zero intolerance looms. Had referees tackled the problem early and decisively, awarding as many penalties in each match as the flagrant violation of the laws demanded, football wouldn’t be so sickeningly disfigured now by all that anarchy in the goalmouth.

If performers in sport decide fair play is an outmoded idea, they should be reminded that punishment never goes out of fashion.

Fitting honour for Sir Bobby

After half-a-dozen years, let alone the half-a-dozen days that have passed, the warm emotional resonance of what happened in Durham Cathedral last Monday will still be with many of us who were there. The posthumous honouring of somebody as remarkable as Sir Bobby Robson, inset, could hardly fail to be affecting but there was something particularly moving about the total naturalness of finding a life devoted to a game celebrated so beautifully amid the ancient stones of one of the architectural glories of Europe. It said much about Robson and about his native North East, and it brought to mind the elegance and truth of the late Arthur Hopcraft’s assertions on behalf of football’s significance in British life, especially his declaration that it had never been only a game “since the working classes saw in it an escape route out of drudgery and claimed it as their own”.

Arthur was making points (in the 1960s) that the football of today would struggle to justify but few men ever incarnated his case more comprehensively than the son of the Durham coalfield who came up out of the pit to brighten the fields of this country and the Continent as a player and manager. His spirit spread a glow through that great Norman cathedral, too.

Woodburn wronged

Complaints from seriously offending footballers that they are too severely disciplined often prompt thoughts of a distant time when punishments were frequently so extreme they might have been delivered by a man wearing the black cap. Last week I checked on the day in 1954 that saw the great centre-half Willie Woodburn suspended indefinitely (sine die) after what was just his fourth ordering off. The Rangers and Scotland defender wasn’t a dirty player but, if provoked, he was given to outbursts of punching, butting violence. So — although his belief that he had suffered a grave injustice was publicly endorsed by the flawlessly behaved Tom Finney — the late, lamented Willie may have had less cause for feeling wronged than two other players carpeted on the same day. The Scottish Football Association minutes tell us that G Thom of Arbroath and G Henderson of Alloa received a fortnight’s suspension “for adopting a fighting attitude”.