What has happened is that the sporting gesture — “recalling a batsman, allowing a youngster to get to a century with a gentle delivery when he is on 99, not bowling bouncers to tailenders, pointing out that a catch hasn’t been taken cleanly — is in decline. But that does not mean that the opposite is on the rise. No international captain is likely to recall a batsman the way Gundappa Viswanath did during the Mumbai Test of 1980. But no captain is likely to suggest that his opposite number take him on in a wrestling bout to decide which team bats first either. That happened more than a century ago. Times change.

In any case, at the international level there are codes of conduct in place. Players who behave badly know how to speak out of the range of microphones and cameras. A year ago, there was the Jimmy Anderson-Ravindra Jadeja spat during a Test series in England. Who did what to whom? There was not enough evidence to dock either.

Sledging that calls into question parentage, fidelity, overeating can be controlled by on-field umpires and the captains if the approach is adult and sensible. It is important to remember that cricket is a hard game played with a hard ball and like any sport, deals in passion. Players sometimes get frustrated, feel hard done by and let off steam. Not all such venting of frustration brings the game into disrepute. Sanjay Manjrekar has a lovely story of Kapil Dev, who never lost his cool, walking up to his bowling mark and screaming into the ground during a Test in the West Indies. It happens.

Even the great Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, who only opened his mouth either to appeal or sing Mukesh songs on the field, once asked an umpire in New Zealand, “I know he is bowled, but is he out?” Grown men should be allowed controlled explosions.

The worst thing I have seen on a cricket field is the bowler chasing the batsman across the field armed with a stump and a bagful of bad intentions. It happened during the final of the Duleep Trophy a quarter century ago. Rashid Patel was the chaser, the late Raman Lamba was the batsman hoping that a building would suddenly pop up between him and Patel at Jamshedpur’s Keenan Stadium.

Neither yellow nor red cards would have sufficed then. In any case, the umpire would have had to be remarkably fit to chase two athletic sportsmen and catch up with them before waving cards. Lamba was banned for 10 weeks and Patel for 13, both decisions taken post-match.

Good spirit

Despite the odd fracas — “Dennis Lillee versus Javed Miandad, Colin Croft versus the umpire, Michael Holding versus the stumps” — Test cricket has been generally played in good spirit. Yes, there is banter, and occasionally things spiral out of control, moving swiftly into the realm of international diplomacy (Harbhajan Singh versus Andrew Symonds), but cards? I don’t think so.

Perhaps at club and school levels, an argument could be made for cards (and that is all the MCC is saying right now, experimenting with the card system at the lower levels). Last year, during a club match in Bermuda, the wicketkeeper physically attacked the batsman who swung his bat at him but missed. The keeper has been banned for life which is as it should be. His captain’s defence was interesting: it stemmed from, he said: “an accumulation of dropped catches and frustration.” The sight of a police van near the pitch summed up the instance when “bad behaviour” bleeds into criminality.

Yellow and red cards in T20 leagues might be useful, however. In the IPL, the bat-throwing Kieron Pollard reacting to a ball-throwing Mitchell Starc both banned for a few overs would have cooled the hot-heads and sent a message to the teams. No team likes to lose their best players for bad behaviour, and this is one way of being guaranteed the support of franchises for a clean game.

Violent expressions of frustration call for both monetary fines as well as “cooling periods” that adversely affect the team.

The stakes are high in the upper reaches of the game today. Offenders risk losing money, their place in the side and perhaps even advertising contracts. Acceptable behaviour becomes an economic necessity.