Aussies may soon be back sledging

Are we witnessing a new, clean-cut Australia team who don't need to resort to picking a verbal scrap in order to raise adrenalin levels and overcome their opponents?

The Australian administrators would certainly like us to think so. Eighteen months ago, under pressure from their board, the players signed up to a code of conduct in which they all but declared an end to sledging.

The feeling was that the triumphs of Steve Waugh's serial winners had been tainted by their unabashed championing of sledging, or, to use Waugh's euphemism, "mental disintegration".

When Waugh came into the Australia team in the mid-1980s, sledging was a fringe activity.

Allan Border, one of Waugh's predecessorsis reported to have said before the 1989 tour to England that he was sick of being seen as a good bloke and losing. "I'd sooner be a p***k and win," he said.

Merv Hughes took this further: "What Border did, and what Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh continued, was to say, 'Right, nothing is more important than winning. We're not here to have a Sunday afternoon social game with these guys. We're here to beat the b******s'."

Umpire David Shepherd has officiated in dozens of Australia's Test matches over the last 18 months.

He said: "They still chirp now and then but they are better than they used to be," before, adding with a smile, "but then they are winning at the moment and that helps."

Australia, of course, aren't the only team who send the air blue but it is endemic to their game. It is easier to cut down on the verbals when you are steamrollering opponents but when the aura of invincibility begins to fade it could be harder to hold back on what comes so naturally.

This summer, starting at Bristol on Sunday, will be the big test - especially if England can put more pressure on the biggest bully in cricket's playground.

TOP THREE AUSTRALIAN SLEDGES
1. Glenn McGrath welcomes Zimbabwean Eddo Brandes with: "Oi, Brandes, why are you so fat?" "Because every time I f**k your wife, she gives me a biscuit," was the famous reply.

2. Mark Waugh was chirping away at Jimmy Ormond during the Surrey seamer's only Test in 2001. Eventually, Ormond said: "I may not be as good as a lot of the players out here, but you're a fine one to talk. You're not even the best player in your own bloody family."

3. "How does it feel to drop the World Cup, son?", Steve Waugh chides South Africa's Herschelle Gibbs after he spilled a sitter in the 1999 World Cup semi-final.