Enforce your bowling average, Stu

There is a lot of silliness talked about cricket. For every speech from the admirable polymath Kumar Sangakkara there are a thousand marketing directives, meetings about World Cup formats and tweets from Australian one-day players. But in the pantheon of preposterousness, surely nothing can touch the description of Stuart Broad as England's "Enforcer".

The Enforcer was an excellent title for the mid-seventies Dirty Harry film. It might be a very good brand name for a tough detergent. And beyond any reasonable doubt, somewhere in New Jersey or Naples or Shipton-under-Wychwood, a mid-ranking mafioso is bashing up low-raking mafiosi for their dinner money and numbers-racket takings while they cry, "Please, not my face, Mister Enforcer."

However, other than the irritant qualities he shares with bleach, nothing about Stuart Broad puts him in the same category as these. As his search for a wicket grows ever more frustrating, the title hangs around his neck like an ironic albatross, every untidy none-fer and northward click on the bowling average cawing, "Enforce that" in mocking glee.

The problem with nicknames, especially self-styled ones, is that you can end up looking like a bit of a berk if you aren't living up to the hype. Now, as sobriquets go, The Enforcer, is pretty cool. It's up there with Big Shooter, the name that Cliff from Cheers gave himself (but nobody else used), and there's no sterner criterion than that. The Enforcer wouldn't be out of place amongst Iron Mike, The Fridge or The Undertaker - it's just not currently a very good handle for the intermittently effective England pace bowler.

At the time of writing, Stuart has more fines for dissent than he does wickets in the ODI series against Sri Lanka, and even if he does deliver a hat-full at his home ground, I would argue that his nickname is holding him back. In the ODI at Lord's, pundits and team-mates were, as always, quick to praise his aggression, combativeness and excellent use of swearwords. Broady proved, once again, that he's the sort of cricketer who is always thinking about his game - covering his mouth with his hands to mutter curse words, thus keeping his hard-earned out of the hands of the match referee.

Some find the tantrums and the double teapots unedifying, but I personally quite enjoy a bit of bad behaviour with my sport, so it's not really that. It's that this Enforcer rubbish is encouraging the player to be that what he is not, or should not be: a brainless, bang-it-in numbskull. His best and most significant spell for England came at The Oval in 2009, when he pitched the ball up: this bouncer macho stuff a) doesn't work and b) makes him look like a total div. He will never take enough wickets to keep others out of the team with this tactic.

His team-mates and many friends in the media should do the boy a favour: stop portraying him as a tough guy, and let him get on with bowling wicket-taking balls and keeping his mouth shut. And if they have to, they should enforce him.