Let's not make too much out of 'Windowgate'

Nasser Hussain, writing for the Daily Mail, says Matt Prior's tantrum that resulted in a shattered glass window at Lord's, is the kind of thing that happens all the time in cricket. It showed that Prior cared, so let us move on.

The dressing room is exactly the right place to take out your frustrations, whatever England are claiming about the manner in which the window was broken. We’ve all done it, and I should know. I remember kicking a fridge in Rawalpindi after Wasim Akram got me lbw in a one-dayer when the ball pitched miles outside leg.

Why has there been such a hoo-ha after Prior broke a single pane of glass in the Lord’s pavilion, following his sacrificial run-out on the final day of the second Test against Sri Lanka, asks Derek Pringle in the Daily Telegraph. Given the pressures on those at the top of the sport, it's no wonder manners sometimes slip.

The problem is that cricketers, as well as cricket itself, are held up – unjustly, as it happens – as the moral paragons of the sporting world. Oikish behaviour, however accidental, is widely frowned upon: breaking windows, other than with a cleanly struck six, is simply not cricket, as Prior well knows.