Imagine this scenario: a great sportsman, popular beyond measure, has announced his retirement and has only two matches left before he rides off into a lucrative sunset. His career and reputation are made, but he knows that the earning potential from his last two games, if things go well and his team win the series and with it his sport's greatest prize, is immeasurable. There is one small problem: he's injured.

How badly injured, he doesn't really know. He knows, though, that he is hurting but that he has to play in the last two games. Just has to.

Cortisone, legal, frequently administered and a wonderful masking agent for pain, won't do the trick because there is a limit to how much of it the body can properly cope with, and he's already had five injections this year. So he asks around. Takes something, anything, and plays his last two matches.

Far-fetched? Fanciful? Thankfully yes, because cricket historically has not had a problem with drugs, either performance-enhancing ones or those designed to mask injuries. Isn't it good to be able to say that? A team game presumably presents more barriers to drug abuse than an individual sport, so isn't it good to know that England and Australia are giving us their real selves this summer, rather than a Frankensteinian version created by those who would distort through drug-induced means?

Readers of the sport section of this newspaper yesterday might have been forgiven for wondering what kind of people professional sport produces, with Dwain Chambers, the convicted doper, grinning back at us while telling us of his plans for Usain Bolt, and the “Bath Three” - Michael Lipman, Andrew Higgins and Alex Crockett - following their colleagues, Matt Stevens and Justin Harrison, into shame-faced oblivion. Let's not even get started on cycling. Or swimming.

Cricket can claim no leasehold on the higher moral ground, for sure. The match-fixing story of the 1990s was one of the worst to befall any sport, there being no greater deception on the paying public than athletes deliberately trying to lose, give away their wickets or leak easy runs. Sport is an unwritten contract between those who play and those who watch and, for the most part in the 1990s, it was a contract broken by the performers.

But for a leading sport, there have been relatively few drug scandals in cricket. Shane Warne, of this parish, was sent home from the World Cup in 2003 when hydrochlorothiazide and amiloride, diuretics or classic masking agents (take your pick), were found in his bloodstream. Warne had made a rapid recovery from a shoulder injury to play in the tournament and, when tested and found guilty, was banned for a year, although Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) at the time, argued that it should have been more.

Three years later, Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif were also banned for testing positive for nandrolone, the first time that cricketers had been found abusing banned steroids. Other than that, most drug offences have been of the recreational type, Ed Giddins arguing that his drink had been spiked with cocaine and myriad others (Ian Botham, Phil Tufnell, Stephen Fleming among them) pleading guilty to taking a puff or two of marijuana. Overall, though, in a period when drugs have hit other sports hard, cricket has been relatively unscathed.

In part this is because of a laudable attempt by the authorities to treat the issue seriously. The ICC signed up to Wada's stringent regulations in 2006, a prerequisite, of course, to becoming an Olympic sport and, in England, a necessary first step to guarantee government funding. So whereas, ridiculously, the 1990s was a period in which county cricketers were tested but international cricketers not, now international players know that if they transgress they will be found out.

All has been going swimmingly until this week, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) backed a number of high-profile Indian players who have said that they will not comply with the “whereabouts” clause. This clause stipulates that cricketers of a high enough international ranking must give Wada notification of their whereabouts for one hour each day with three months' notice for a period of a year. If the athlete is not where he says he will be, he gets one strike. Three strikes and gone.

India's cricketers - and they are not alone - have expressed reservations because of the potential security threat to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, who is known to want to keep his movements secretive, and because of the gross invasion of privacy that such stringent testing implies. There are fears more generally that such a system will penalise those administratively inefficient rather than those who are guilty. These are legitimate concerns.

Ultimately, though, it is a price that cricketers may have to pay if they want their sport to remain clean and, more importantly, to be perceived to be clean. While the chief executive of the players' union, Tim May, accepts the practical difficulties in adopting the system, he should also recall his comments three years ago when he warned that the increasingly punishing schedule could force players to start abusing drugs.

“You only have to look at the doping record in baseball to see that recovery, not enhanced power, is the motivation for most drug abuse,” he said. “The more we push the players, the more they may start to look at options.”

May's nod in baseball's direction is relevant, it being another sport whose reputation is in shreds. And for cricketers who want their achievements to be recognised rather than mired in suspicion, they should think about someone such as Mark McGwire, the former Major League home run record-holder who has yet to be inducted into the Hall of Fame because of doubts about his drug taking. By refusing to answer questions about steroid abuse in front of a congressional hearing, McGwire cast doubt on his record and that of everyone else of that era.

Integrity is at the heart of sport, which is why match-fixing was cricket's most serious crisis and why snuffing out the drugs threat, even if the threat is a vague one and the methods seem unnecessarily draconian, is vital. In the scenario painted at the beginning of this column, Freddie would, of course, say “no”. To the “whereabouts” clause and drugs testing in general, the rest of cricket should say “yes”.