Opinion: Is cheating at cricket a capital crime?

Hawke's Bay Today senior reporter Doug Laing. Photo / File

Observers of human behaviour must have wondered what on earth was going on as New Zealand's sports commentariat and its far too easily led followers descended into a stage of advanced apoplexy over "ball tampering" in a cricket match in South Africa.

Firstly, for those who have no idea what it was about, because the ball in big cricket matches tends to deteriorate as the overs wear on, a new ball is introduced every now and then.

It's against the rules to "tamper" with it, rather than let nature and the game simply take its course.

As it happens, the Australian cricketers did something a bit naughty during a match against South Africa in Cape Town. But on the other hand they did what we, as adults, expect of our kids when they do wrong, they owned up.

What followed, however, was a degree of condemnation that might attach itself more to a lynch mob after finding out someone down the road had committed one of life's more distasteful crimes.

It certainly didn't parallel the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper, and thus barely warranted such a response, for basically, in sport, the rules are there to be broken.

When you get pinged there is generally a prescribed penalty, you take your medicine and carry on.

But the penalty was never supposed to include such vitriol as that which has affixed itself to the actions of the Australian cricketers' team leadership, such that the Race Relations and Human Rights commissioners might consider getting their heads together at some stage and providing a bit of educational support for those who've taken this misdemeanour as the perfect opportunity to go Aussie-bashing.

The key plank of sport is camaraderie, but, strangely enough, another plank is cheating, or more to the point, bending the rules.

New Zealand has actually benefited hugely from a guy who cheated with the ball.

It gave us rugby, our national game, in which part of the game is being the best cheat and getting away with it.

William Webb Ellis cheated, and they named a World Cup trophy after him. They didn't hang him.