KEY POINTS:
Someone please tell me what England skipper Paul Collingwood did wrong in the infamous dismissal of New Zealand's Grant Elliott in the fourth one-day cricket international last week.
And please don't give me that spirit of cricket business... I used to be a believer but that stuff is
deader than Tutankhamen.
Collingwood has already apologised, which admittedly makes it difficult to plead the case that he was in the right after Elliott was run out. Collingwood confirmed that an appeal would stand after Elliott and bowler Ryan Sidebottom collided during an attempted run, leaving Elliott injured and exposed.
But there's a bit of excess outrage going on here. TV commentator Ian Smith, whom I seem to remember would get all bitter and twisted at the excesses of the media - real or imagined - when he was a player, immediately invoked the Australia-New Zealand underarm incident. The worst since then, Smithy thundered.
No, it wasn't. Bowler Ryan Sidebottom was going for the ball when he clattered into Elliott, knocking him over and injuring him. Sidebottom is a big side of Yorkshire beef and he made a bit of hamburger out of Elliott, who limped off after being given out.
Cricket's laws state that, in a situation when the ball is live and everyone running, that the batsman must give way to the bowler. In other words, a batsman cannot use his body to prevent the bowler getting to the ball.
Elliott wasn't - they just collided; it was an accident. Whereas the underarm incident was a deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to win the game by hiding behind one of its arcane laws.
I hope Smith and all the others who harrumphed over Collingwood's actions similarly remonstrated at a the incident which unfolded when New Zealand played the Sri Lankans in 2006, at Christchurch.
Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan was run out when he left his crease to congratulate century-making batsman Kumar Sangakkara. Technically, the New Zealanders were right. The umpire warned Murali (whether he heard is another matter). But no-one called him back, as they were howling that Collingwood should have.
In terms of the spirit of the game, it was a barren decision. The Sri Lankans said they'd had the chance to do the same to New Zealand batsman Nathan Astle but didn't.
No, here in little old New Zealand, we can be a bit selective about our morality. Captain at the time of the Murali incident was Stephen Fleming who, when taxed about it, said: "It's not about sportsmanship or the spirit of the game; it's a cricketing decision based on a lapse by Muralitharan."
Oh, well, that's all right then. You could argue a cricketing lapse that Elliott and his fellow batsman were running on the same side of the pitch - which is a no-no; so you avoid collisions - and that crashing into a Sidebottom (not a phrase you hear every day...) is a rather large lapse when seeking to make a run.
New Zealand's Ewen Chatfield was criticised for running out England's Derek Randall in the 1970s by pretending to let the ball go when bowling and then taking the bails off when Randall, the non-striking batsman, backed up too far. Mean and nasty; against the spirit of the game - but Randall shouldn't have been cribbing a metre, converting possible run outs into runs.
So why was New Zealand so pinched-nostrils about the Elliott incident? And why are people like Herald on Sunday cricket columnist Mark Richardson getting grief from within the Black Caps for expressing similar feelings?
For the life of me, I can't see what the Brits did wrong. They took a wicket. They were doing what the Brits are often accused of not doing - being hard-nosed, competitive and not backing down.
Think about the Australians. Would they have thought twice about running out a fallen Elliott? That'd be a big fat no, cobber. The Australians would run their grandmothers out - and then sledge them on the way back to the pavilion. Hey, granny, your fruit cake sucks...
That's part of the reason they are world champions in one-dayers and the best side on the planet. Ethics? Australians think anyone who dabbles in ethics is either a lawyer or mentally defective. Or both.
New Zealand's victory was imbued with an enormous sense of injustice being righted. Watch Vettori saluting the win like a Millwall FC fan - all effing and blinding and repressed violence, for which he too later apologised.
Why all this apologising? It's good that cricketers represent their country with their blood on fire, isn't it? But move on, lads. It's a shame we didn't show some of this fire and grit in the test series, hmmm?
Professional sport is just that. You take your chances. It's your job. Winning is winning and England lost that match only because three of their fielders behaved like statues on that last, hilarious, fated, overthrown ball when Kyle Mills and Mark Gillespie were running for the tie.
You either play hard and to win or you embrace the 'spirit of the game'. Professional sport does not make it easy to have it both ways.
The English humorist Paul Merton once said: "If you go to the bathroom and there's no toilet paper, you can always slide down the bannister. Don't tell me you haven't done it."
We Kiwis maybe need to stock up on loo paper and stop pretending we haven't done the bannister thing.
