The tale of Steven and the spider

People who play sports are an honourable breed. Other areas of human endeavour may be rife with corruption, deceit and implausible expenses claims, but when a sports player gives you their word, you can depend on it.

When a golfer tells you she only took one shot to get out of the bunker and that the 12 explosions of sand you witnessed were produced by a burrowing meerkat, you know she's telling the truth, because she's a golfer. When a professional footballer pirouettes to the ground inside the penalty area, you know he is really hurt. And when a cricketer insists that the ball did not bounce, you may rest assured that it was so.

It naturally follows from this truth that sports people never ever attempt to excuse their mistakes by reference to outside forces. They may, on occasion, seek to apportion blame where it is properly due, but that is entirely different.

For example, my own cricket career - tragically cut short in 1992 by a lack of ability - was blighted by misfortune. Due to a spectacular run of bad luck, I once suffered ten dropped catches in a row, none of which were my fault. I won't bore you with the full story, but to summarise, the explanations for my fumbles were as follows:

1. The sun was too low in the sky and too bright
2. Indigestion
3. Low-flying seagull
4. Someone sneezed on the boundary
5. I suddenly remembered I'd left the gas on
6. Cat allergy
7. Cricket ball allergy
8. The CIA
9. Aliens
10. Temporary insanity

This is why the incident involving Steven Smith and the spidercam appears at first glance to be so disappointing. Shaking your head and pointing to the sky immediately after fluffing a sitter is quite frankly a little embarrassing, and threatens to ruin the good name of honest sports persons everywhere.

But on further reflection, I think we should be lenient. As a committed arachnophobe, who regards the continued existence of this eight-legged menace to be a blight on our civilisation, I can sympathise with Steven. Spidercam? If there's one thing worse than a spider, it's a flying spider, and if there's one thing worse than a flying spider, it's a flying spider with a camera. No wonder he was distracted.

We shouldn't forget that he comes from a country where spiders are in the process of evolving into the dominant life form. They are already large enough to eat birds, and by the time Steven's great-great-great-grandchildren are old enough to vote, they will probably be governed by a Labour-Tarantula coalition. It is no surprise that Australia's stand-in skipper maintains a high level of alert when it comes to spiders, things that look a bit like spiders, or things named after spiders

The only good thing to emerge from this unfortunate incident is that it gives Australian primary school teachers the chance to make their lessons more relevant by updating an old nursery rhyme:

Little Steve Smith
Stood in the slips
Watching the match slip away
Along came a skier
Which dropped down beside him
But he blamed Channel 9 anyway.