But Devine denied that his comment, directed at a batsman, was sledging, seeing that his opponent’s rear end really was on fire after a fast ball had ignited a box of matches in the player’s pocket.

Australians are recognised worldwide as leaders in many sports and similar endeavours. They are also regarded as the world’s leading sledgers -unfairly, some would say.

The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary says of sledging “Australian cricket slang”.

Sledging could be regarded as similar to gamesmanship. Over the years, players from all over have engaged in what has generally been good-natured banter, but sometimes in the heat of the moment that good nature has been found wanting. The Australian cricket team after the controversial 1973-74 tour of New Zealand gained the title of the “Ugly Australians” because of various clashes.

The Australian National Dictionary says sledging is an attempt by a fielder to break the concentration of a person batting by needling, or abuse.

Ian Chappell said the term sledging came into use around 1963-64. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 4, 1982, he said a cricketer who swore in the presence of a female was said to have been “as subtle as a sledgehammer”.

At the time, a song in the top of the hit parades was a Percy Sledge number When a Man Loves a Woman. The use of the name Sledge made its way onto the cricket field, where it stayed.

The Sun-Herald in 1975 editorialised “sledging, or the gentle art of talking a player out, has no place in women’s cricket”.

My big dictionary says the term “comes from subtle as a sledgehammer”.

It goes on to quote the Age in 1979 as saying “a year or so earlier, the Australian team coined sledging for needling or gamesmanship”.

Sledging seems to have moved on from cricket. When Paul Keating called John Howard “his oiliness” in 1975, Wilson Tuckey took the opportunity to respond in what the Sun-Herald of December 21 called “sledging”.

Footballers, golfers and tennis players, and apparently women’s netballers, have also been accused in recent years of having sledged.

lauriebarber.com; lbword@midcoast.com.au