What is defined as bullying on a sporting field?

Bullying has been bandied about in the press so frequently this week that I needed to check the definition: a person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.

Okay, by this decree I'd argue that many a manager, coach or captain in any sport could be accused of bullying. But how to deal with it and how to define it, despite this Oxford dictionary entry, depends on the individual.

My early morals were formed by peers, parents, and sports team cultures, rather than religion or schooling. In the working-class town I was brought up in it was taboo to "tell" on another. Standing up for yourself meant fighting your own battles, not getting teachers or parents to thwart the bullies.

It was actually during a respite in "hunting season" - the first week of term at my secondary school, where upper years chased down the new pupils and beat them up - that I befriended future England cricketer Darren Maddy, who was batting against the sports hall with a tennis ball and an aluminium pole, which later transformed into a weapon when threatened by another boy pushing his way up the order.

Although this practice of mass bullying was hardly condoned by the school, teachers were aware of its existence. The inaction to halt the break-time riots between pupils was part of the "character-building" beliefs of the 1980s, the decade of football hooliganism, miners' strikes, and the Falklands War. And violence was casual and frequent. I nearly lost a little finger fighting a kid who had a razor blade hidden in his hand, and was then in trouble myself when I refused to name the perpetrator, such was the power of the don't-tell doctrine.

Steve Harmison's response to Pietersen's accusations of bullying is more old-school than modern, a top-down era of behaviour reports and dossiers, rather than a team culture that was better at self-regulating. "The senior players would have dealt with this," says Harmison of Pietersen's claims that bowlers forced players to apologise for misfields. "When that went on, and it did at times, myself or Andrew Flintoff would have a word in the ear of someone who was letting off steam."

A cricket team should be a collective, a community of individuals that support, depend, police, and, you would hope, actually care for one another

Harmison questions the wider definition of bullying and highlights Pietersen's open disdain of Michael Carberry and James Taylor - Pietersen told Flower that Taylor, the son of a jockey and only 5ft 6in, wasn't good enough to play for England. By that Oxford definition of a bully, in this case to denigrate fledgling Test players, Pietersen is throwing stones in a glass house.

Systematic intimidation, ridicule, and unrelenting criticism of a player: yes, bullying. Messrs Broad and Anderson swearing at fielders for missing balls, no. However, that depends on the player being castigated. Pietersen talks of Trott "exploding on the boundary" because he'd had enough of being "picked on".

Much of what counts as bullying depends on the victim's perception. The boys at the back of the changing room laughing at the KP Genius Twitter account might not have been aware that their victim felt "incredibly bullied and vulnerable" and would end up crying before Andy Flower - not the first shoulder you would have thought Pietersen would have sought out.

In the classroom, the bully is rightly vilified. My era of fighting boys with poles and blades in an unpoliced playground should not be wistful. Yet on the sports field the bully is often praised.

Australia, a team renowned for their ability to "keep their foot on the throat" of the opposition, are world beaters. "Get ready for a broken f****n arm," said Clarke to Anderson in the first Ashes Test in Australia in 2013. "And you'd better bring me your dinner money at the same time tomorrow," he might have followed up with, imitating that brat at school who has enlisted a bigger boy as a henchman, in this case Mitchell Johnson. Although Clarke was slapped with a fine, both Cook and Anderson shrugged off the threats, taking the old-school-of-hard-knocks approach to fighting fire with fire.

And here, in the realm of sport, I have to confess, I prefer my outdated ethos: that working-class dogma to stick up for yourself rather than snitch. When the West Indies pacemen of the '80s bounced and broke the English batsman, akin to that school bully taking the dinner money out of their pockets even during the summer holidays, it was Brian Close who would rather be punched in the face than be picked on. And when Tony Greig infamously threatened to make that same West Indies team grovel, it was King Viv and his men who strode out against an entire empire of bullies.

A cricket team should be a collective, a community of individuals that support, depend, police, and, you would hope, actually care for one another. In all of Pietersen's flashbulb interviews to push "that 300-page monologue of rage and claustrophobia masquerading as an autobiography," as Barney Ronay reads the starlet's tome, it was chat-show host Graham Norton who perhaps nailed it when he wondered, "Maybe, just maybe, team sport's not for you."