Tuesday, February 12, 2002 Thirty years ago the RS in RS Whitington, the enchantingly spiky late Australian cricket writer, might have stood for Rumbustious Slander. Captains Outrageous, his account of the 1970-71 Ashes series, stands out in these days of straitened crick-lit as a 244-page triumph of bile over guile. No Australian icon was too sacred to avoid a cold blast of Whitington's mockery: from Doug Walters ("might better have been named Falters") to Ian Chappell ("too obsessed with the state and position of his batting accoutrements") to Don Bradman ("if only he would administer cricket the way he batted").

But two things really got on Whitington's wick: defensive tactics and the bouncing of tailenders. On the first count Whitington, had he been around this summer, would doubtless have been satisfied: few teams have played on a canvas so bright as the one painted by Steve Waugh and his men. On the second count, well, Whitington might have caught the No. 69 tram to St Kilda and wrote about beach volleyball instead. "Nothing and nobody will convince me I'm wrong," he fumed all those years ago. "If this practice is to continue we won't have specialist bowlers much longer."

We still have specialist bowlers, for now, but we have lost much besides. And the Australians, in terms of dignity, respect and the affection in which they are held, have lost more than most this unsavoury summer, culminating in their final one-day match at Perth when Brett Lee bounced Jacques Kallis even though the batsman, distracted by a seagull, had backed away and the umpire was poised to signal a dead-ball.

Bouncing tailenders is something else again. It is cricket's equivalent of eye-gouging. Unedifying, unfair, unnecessary. There was no need for "Bing" to ping Makhaya Ntini's helmet twice in two balls of the Adelaide Test; a fastish yorker would have sent Ntini on his way. Nor did he need, in the same game, to repeatedly pursue the cowering Nantie Hayward's head; a ball fired anywhere within a two-foot radius of the stumps would have sufficed.

Lee, though, is exciting and excitable, and has copped enough flak already. A more disturbing twist to the grubby episode was Steve Waugh's defence of his misfiring young gun: "It's Test-match cricket ... there's no favours out there ... it's not like it was 20 years ago."

But why not? Twenty years ago the mix was pretty much right. There was no namby-pamby moral code implying that anyone batting from No. 7 down should only have to deal with half-volleys. Yet it wasn't open slather either. Upon arriving at the crease a genuine batting bunny - someone of Terry Alderman's ilk - would be greeted with a barrage of fast, fullish deliveries for the first 15 minutes or so. If he survived those he might get a couple of testing rib-ticklers. Handle them OK and he could expect the odd bouncer heading his way. By the time he reached 30 or 40 he was fair game.

A significant turning point, in Australia at least, was the Caribbean tour of 1994-95 when Glenn McGrath, the same man who sickeningly felled South African tailender Steve Elworthy a couple of weeks ago, made it plain that he would bounce the West Indian quicks no matter how hard they bounced back. Australia subsequently beat West Indies for the first time in 19 years, and the die had been cast. The Aussies kept winning, the bouncers kept coming and, seven years later, the bullying of tailenders remains cricket's most distasteful sight. This summer it was harder to watch than ever.

It will surely one day be a matter of deep regret to Steve Waugh that his Australian team, unlike Bradman's 1948 side, is admired rather than loved. We're happy enough to watch them winning but we would rather not invite them home for a barbecue, thanks very much. Their sledging, their dalliances with bookmakers and their take-no-prisoners approach - in which the hounding of tailenders plays an integral part - offer some explanation for this. It might also help explain why the moderately out-of-form Waugh suddenly finds himself the subject of a media frenzy so vicious that even RS Whitington would surely baulk at it, a frenzy that has more to do with emotion than logic (one veteran observer tut-tutted over the weekend that Waugh's Test average has slid from 51.88 to 50.83, neglecting to mention that the same deteriorating has-been averages 51.20 in his last dozen Tests).

What Waugh needs now is some good publicity. Telling his pace attack to pitch the ball up to South Africa's tail over the next few weeks would be a start. They are good enough to do it. It would set an example to the rest of the Test world. And it would have made Richard Smallpeice Whitington a happy man. Chances are, though, that nothing and nobody will convince Waugh and his fast men that they are wrong.

Chris Ryan is former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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