Need to know video: Singh's alleged racial slur

The present row in cricket has been brewing for damn near 50 years. Ever since sledging became widespread, it was always going to escalate to a point when two teams could no longer bear to be on the same pitch and the whole structure of cricket would totter.

The gloriously ironical part is that it is the Australians who are swooning like virgins and saying that sledging has gone too far. This from the nation who invented sledging, this from the nation who gloried in sledging, this from the nation who believed that sledging was irrefragable proof of national machismo.

It was Australia who coined the term sledging - meaning a remark of sledgehammer subtlety - and it was Australia who dignified it, with the declaration by Steve Waugh, the captain from 1999 to 2004, that sledging was “mental disintegration”.

The point everybody missed is that cricket is not an insult competition, any more than it is a spitting competition. But, hey, the Australians are world champions and everything they do must be right. So for years, every cricketing nation has tried to be as much like Australia as possible: to hire Australian coaches, to establish Australian-style academies and to use playground insults on the cricket pitch.

Sledging is part of the game, Australians say. That’s true, just as kicking people in the shins is part of football and punching people in the nose is part of rugby. Both these acts are punished. Offenders concede fouls and get sent off. Punishment doesn't stop it, but it keeps it under control. But sledging has been out of control for years.

What’s said on the pitch stays on the pitch. It’s all part of a man’s code. Anyone who complains is a poofter. Thus, Australia brought this childish practice of sledging into cricket, with the result that all the other international teams feel obliged to do the same.

Last summer, England players threw jellybeans on to the pitch to insult Zaheer Khan, of India. I mean, how pathetic is that? India were furious about that, too. The Asian teams come from a culture in which politeness is a more respected thing than it is in Australia or England, but many Asian cricketers have thought it appropriate to fight back in kind.

Continuing escalation is inevitable. If I called you an idiot, again and again and again, you would eventually call me a bloody fool. What would you think if I then staggered back in horror. “He called me a fool! He said bloody! This mustn’t be allowed!” That is what has happened.

Australia led the way in insults and now, claiming that an India player used a racist term, they are saying that rude behaviour on a cricket pitch is terrible, rotten, awful, mustn’t be allowed. If Harbhajan Singh did call Andrew Symonds a monkey as a racist insult, it is pretty nasty. As nasty as when Darren Lehmann, the Australia batsman, called the Sri Lankans “black c***s”. Many Australians defended Lehmann’s outburst because it was “in the heat of the moment”. It was pretty nasty, no matter what the moment’s temperature.

There are a million complications in this row, to do with ever-rising Indian nationalism, ditto Indian prosperity, the changing centres of power in cricket and a million issues of culture, politics and self-worth. Such things are normal in international sport, part of its endless fascination.

The reason the row has got out of hand is not because of racism. It is because too soft a line has been taken on the practice of sledging for far too long.

No one in authority wanted to be seen to be picking on the Australians; none of the players wanted to complain because he would look soft and insufficiently masculine - and, what’s more, he would get sledged ten times worse next time.

Cricket should not have set racism as the final frontier of unacceptable behaviour; a line should have been drawn years ago at the point when banter becomes bitter invective. Cricket has been soft on a serious matter for decades and now cricket is in crisis.

Australia has long promoted mental disintegration; as a result, we are facing the disintegration of cricket.