The next time I hear a player from the modern era talk of the 'spirit of the game', I'll puke. Honest.

This is the era where keepers are trained to take the bails off, even when the batsman and his entire family are behind the crease, when a ball goes down the leg side, just so as to fox the umpire into hopefully not calling it a wide.

This is the era where the batsman's first act on being rapped on the pads is to hold up his bat and pretend he had edged it.

This is the era where a bowler who fails to get wickets going over the wicket then goes round, with two men up close on the leg side, and bounces into the body (remember Douglas Jardine, Moin?) and when even that fails, bowls a beamer, walks off without even a pro forma apology, and then tells the umpire it was because he had split the webbing of his hand (hello, Shoaib).

This is the era where three, four, or more fielders converge on the batsman after every ball to tell him what they hope to do to the batsman's mother, sister and sundry other relatives -- oh hullo, Shahid Afridi, Akthar et al.

This is also the era where, if you can't find any natural advantage in the wicket, you try and see if you can create some interest by judicious use of the spikes of your shoe.

What 'spirit' are we talking about, in an age where schoolboy behavior is justified as 'gamesmanship', where illegal deliveries are camouflaged as a 'slip of the hand', where any Inzy's 'woe is me' act is, quite frankly, amusing. Apparently the reason he thinks it is against the spirit of the game is because he was not aware of the rules.

Gee, tough -- 16 years in international cricket, a good half dozen or more of those years as captain of an international side, a rating as one of the premier batsmen in the world, and you don't know the various modes of dismissal?

And that ignorance is somehow charming, and anything that shows up that charm as just plain ignorance is against the 'spirit'? Geez -- if a player were all that concerned about the spirit of the game, he would, the evening of his dismissal, have walked up to the opposing captain and gone, hey, mate, if you were that desperate to get my wicket you should have just asked me -- I'd have given it to you; shared a laugh; shrugged, and got on with it. Ah well...