Diego Maradona is a filthy rotten cheat and anyone who disagrees is either in denial or in need of glasses. But then so is Pelé. And Matthews. And Best, Finney, Platini and Cruyff. And Sampras, Navratilova, Prost and Bradman. Even Terry Butcher - the Scotland assistant manager, who insists he will not shake hands with Maradona till kingdom come - is a cheat. Indeed, show me a sportsman who claims never knowingly to have broken the rules and I will show you a man with a rapidly growing hooter.

We Brits have always had a bit of a thing for rules: after all, we invented most of them. In a demented century and a half between the Seven Years War and the death of Queen Victoria, the British spent almost as much time codifying sports as playing them.

This was not just so that teams around the country could compete with each other sans anarchy, but to accommodate the new gambling boom among the aristocracy. As Julian Norridge says in his wonderful new book, Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please?, “the rich wanted to know exactly what they were betting on”.

Norridge’s wider thesis is that our love of rules and regulations, which did so much to lay the foundations of the global sporting phenomenon of the past half-century, has held us back in that we have been more concerned with respecting the rules than with winning the damn matches. It is an intriguing argument, but one that is undermined by the evidence.

The historical reality is that the British have been as willing to bend, stretch and break the rules as any other nation on earth, with the possible exception of the French (OK, that was a cheap shot).

In his autobiography, Mike Atherton, chief cricket correspondent of this parish, wrote of his unforgettably intense duel with Allan Donald in 1998. During those manic exchanges, Atherton gloved the ball to Mark Boucher, the South Africa wicketkeeper, but, like Maradona in 1986, chose not to reveal this rather important fact to the umpire and went on to make an unbeaten 98. Most of us chose to be amused rather than outraged by this episode, but I wonder what Butcher would make of it all? Must Athers face the prospect of never being able to shake the self-styled bulldog defender by the hand again? Does he even give a stuff?

To be fair to Butcher, he was probably not suggesting that Maradona is the only chap to have cheated in all sporting history (although he didn’t half go on about it), but that the Argentinian had cheated in an unforgivable sort of way. This may sound like splitting hairs, but it hints at an important truth.

All would have been fine had Maradona inched the ball forward at a free kick, or hustled a throw-in, or even had a bit of a tug at a defender.

All would have constituted a breach of the rules, all might have led to an illegal goal, but all would have come out in the wash. Butcher may have grumbled for ten minutes, but he would not have harboured a tragi-comic lifetime grudge. But Maradona, by fisting the ball into the net, pricked something deeper and more delicate in Butcher’s world view.

There are rules, it seems, and there are rules. What Maradona broke – for Butcher at least – was an unwritten rule, one of those informal conventions that dictate not just the way we play sport, but the way we live life. Most of the gunk on the statute book is hardly known by lawyers, judges and politicians, let alone ordinary mortals such as you and I. But we all know what society – and more importantly, our peers – will tolerate. Drink-driving was once a social necessity; today it is an affront to civilised society. The law did not change, our attitudes did. Similarly, declining to walk was once a crime in cricket. Now it is a part of the prevailing consensus.

Does punching the ball into the net constitute a breach of football’s unwritten code? Did it in 1986? In a sport that does so little to acknowledge the responsibilities of the players to do anything other than get away with whatever they can, regardless of the circumstances, it is difficult to see how. Butcher will doubtless argue the toss until he is even bluer in the face. But ask yourself this question: how would the England defender have reacted if the handball had been at the other end?

Finishing touch

Football as it was played in the 16th and 17th centuries was in urgent need of rules and regulations – not least because people’s heads were getting smashed up in the general mêlée – but it was not until October 26, 1863 that the Football Association first met, in the Freemasons’ Tavern in London’s Covent Garden (on the site of what are now the New Connaught Rooms).

The handball rule was top of the agenda, according to Julian Norridge in his new book, Can We Have Our Balls Back, Please? Some of the 14 men in attendance – representing a miscellaneous collection of London clubs, founded mainly by former public schoolboys – wanted to ban the use of the hands, while others wanted to keep it, and the inevitable result was something of a stalemate.

It was not until 1866 that all handling was banned from football (those who disagreed with the new set of rules flounced off to form the sport of rugby, where they also tolerated a lot more “manly” hacking).

Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net to help Argentina to knock England out of the World Cup 120 years later; it is arguably the most infamous handball in the sport’s history.