In the August edition of Wisden Cricket Monthly leading writers were asked to give their opinion on sledging. Gideon Haigh continues the debate I agree with Steve Waugh that the media is unduly obsessed with sledging in international cricket and that less occurs than is popularly believed. But I don't accept that it's "part and parcel of the game", any more than I accept that road rage is part and parcel of driving. Test players would sometimes benefit from seeing themselves as others see them. When Brett Lee celebrates bowling a tailender with a volley of abuse, I don't think: "What an excitement machine!" I think: "Plonker."

Cricket's real sledging problem, however, is in the 99.9% of the game that isn't international, isn't on television, isn't sponsored. I've been nine years at my present club in Melbourne. Each season the sledging has grown more pervasive, more personal, more pernicious, and more planned – to the extent that the possibility of physical violence has sometimes seemed far from remote. And here Steve Waugh does bear responsibility. The perception that what he euphemises as "mental disintegration" plays a significant part in the modus operandi of the world's best team is highly influential on all behaviours.

Nobody expects cricket to be sanitised, deodorised or bowdlerised. And frankly, you get used to sledging in Aussie club cricket, just as using email inures you to spam. It's got to the extent, in fact, where sledging might have had its day; it's now just a bore rather than a real competitive edge. Even in the humble grades I play, sledging seldom discernably puts anyone off their game. It merely fosters an atmosphere of distrust and ill-feeling. Which is why I find its apologists absurd.

I'd happily concede that it must test mental as well as physical prowess, lest it be merely an endurance contest. But I don't regard sledging as testing anything except our ability to dehumanise and desensitize ourselves and each other, nor do I see cricket as an arena in which aggression should simply go unchecked. I find it strange that cricket should be apologising so consistently for not being like other games, that the idea of it having a spirit, and the notion that players should exercise self-control, should be thought of as archaic. I'd like, in essence, cricket to have the courage of its difference.

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