The unproven allegation that the Indian spin bowler Harbhajan Singh called the black Australian all-rounder Andrew Sym-onds a “monkey” during a Test match in Sydney last week might be shocking in itself. But the more general idea that “sledging” — cricket’s term for on-field chat of the non-Women’s-Institute variety — might have str-ayed into a realm it should never touch is, sadly, not.

The term itself is thought to derive from the phrase “subtle as a sledgehammer”, but much of the yabbering that today’s players cynically pass off as gamesmanship tends to be even more laboured than that. The former Australia captain Steve Waugh did his best to confer a degree of skill and mystery on the practice by calling it “mental disintegration”, but the truth is that sledging is often crude, occasionally offensive, and rarely witty.

“How’s your wife and my kids?” Ian Botham was once asked as he arrived at the crease. It was the high point of the conversation. Popular perception has helped enshrine sledging’s place in cricket’s mythology. Books have been published on the subject, email circulars chuckle at the latest gems, and YouTube puts faces to the name-calling. You don’t need to be a fan of cricket to have heard the one about the Australian fast bowler who asked the Zimbabwean batsman why he was so fat. “Because every time I am with your wife,” came the supposed reply, “she gives me a biscuit.”

If players are continually veering into the sexual or the scatological other types of insult will inevitably enter the fray. It goes without saying, of course, that the Sydney furore has been accompanied by obligatory laments about the damage done to cricket’s standing, as if everyone has been turning a deaf ear all these years. Few in the establishment care to admit it, but the gentleman’s game has always been more streetwise than that.

After all, sport’s first superhero, the Victorian all-rounder WG Grace, would replace the bails if he was bowled, blaming a non-existent breeze or telling the umpires the crowd had come to watch him bat. Match-fixing, ball-tampering and chucking — illegal bowling actions — are as much a part of cricket’s lexicon as leather and willow. But sledging seems to demand a chapter of its own.