National embarrassment about the bad behaviour of the Australia players in the Sydney Test has led to unexpected recriminations and soul-searching in the normally jingoistic home press. The Harbhajan Singh affair, together with the issue of the Australia players’ gamesmanship in the second Test, is such a big story here that it is not only front, back and inside-page news, but also general feature and leader material.

“Victory without honour” was the damning headline on The Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion page yesterday. Even more challenging was the headline at the top of the paper’s front page: “For the sake of our integrity, the arrogant Ponting must be sacked.” Underneath, Peter Roebuck, the former Somerset and England A captain who is a naturalised Australian citizen, wrote: “If Cricket Australia cares a fig for the tattered reputation of our national team in our national sport, it will not for a moment longer tolerate the sort of arrogant and abrasive conduct seen from the captain and his senior players.

“Beyond comparison, it was the ugliest performance put up by an Australian side for 20 years. That the senior players are oblivious to the fury they raised among many followers of the game in this country and beyond merely confirms their own narrow and self-obsessed viewpoint.”

Ponting maintained in his column in The Australian newspaper that “I am satisfied we stayed within the boundaries of the spirit of the game”.

Roebuck’s piece attracted so much attention that it made national TV news programmes. Channel Nine commissioned a phone-in poll to which 50,000 had responded by 6pm local time, with as many as 20 per cent agreeing that Ponting should be sacked as captain. Before the events of Sydney, the merest mention of such a notion would have been not so much risible as treason here.

Elsewhere in The Australian, Ponting’s team are lambasted. “Ugly Australians” a big headline screams over an article by Mike Coward, the respected New South Wales cricket writer. “It has become apparent in recent years,” he wrote, “that the attitude and behaviour of Australian players worsens the moment their superiority is seriously challenged. Ponting and his charges may not like it, but this is a commonly held view. While they consider themselves fair, if hard-nosed and aggressive professionals, a growing number of observers see them as exceptional cricketers given to boorish, arrogant and ungracious behaviour.”

A clear majority of the letters on the Test sent to The Sydney Morning Herald took the same line. Under a headline, “Unsporting conduct leaves stain on the baggy green”, one reader wrote: “The Australian Test team prides itself on playing the game hard. To my mind, the tactics adopted by Ponting should be described by one word: cheating.” A female reader asked: “Does this latest Australian victory, laced with unsporting behaviour and displays of adolescent petulance, leave anyone feeling it was worth celebrat-ing? The words of Shakespeare come to mind: ‘Thou hast it now . . . and, I fear, thou play’dst most foully for it.