Booing not a part of English sporting culture

Ricky Ponting showed no sings of being affected by all the hoopla surrounding the heckling of the Australian captain at Edgbaston, single-handedly making nearly as much as the entire England team on Friday. In the Daily Telegraph, Ed Smith writes that the boo-boys failed to achieve whatever they were hoping to.

First, by increasing the pressure on Ponting, they hoped to help England win. Secondly, after listening to raucous Australian crowds dishing out stick to losing England teams over the last 20 years, they wanted to balance the ledger – to out-vulgarise Australia.

The first is self-evidently idiotic, the second more subtly so. Ponting's batting showed no sign of wilting under the strain. Nor was it ever going to. He is a scrapper to the core. Booing him is about as likely to help the English cause as sledging Steve Waugh.

James Lawton is not a fan of the Barmy Army, and he lets us know in no uncertain terms in the Independent, calling them a "bunch of mind-numbing exhibitionists" who take over "some old cricket ground and filling it with a banality so extreme, so seamless that most victims down the years have at least briefly questioned their will to live".

And Giles Smith is unhappy about talk of of a blanket ban of booze at Test matches. He writes in the Times:

Large numbers of people, at present rendered docile and pliable by alcohol, would be obliged to endure a day’s cricket, with its inevitable longeurs and periods where next to nothing is happening, while stony-faced sober. And then they might really get up to some mischief.