Booing of Australian batsman Steve Smith in Ashes was inexcusable - Yorkshire Post letters

I AGREE with much of Norman J Hazell’s letter lamenting the cynical conduct of cricketers from Douglas Jardine’s ‘bodyline’ series to England’s desperate attempts to dislodge Steve Smith at Lord’s (The Yorkshire Post, August 17).

However, don’t think that the Australians would pull any punches if we had a batsman as obdurate as Smith. I am saddened by Nasser Hussain who said he preferred the nasty, inane sledger which was David Warner to the sanitised version who can’t buy a run at the time of writing. Warner’s behaviour had become intolerable.

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Nasser knows very well that Warner has never been comfortable with the Duke ball on English pitches but took the opportunity to show his own contempt for sportsmanship. Michael Atherton has also been known to sneer at idealistic attitudes to sportsmanship: he would, wouldn’t he? He has form himself when it comes to rubbing stuff on cricket balls. Which brings me back to Steve Smith, a great, great cricketer but a strange, restless man who is hard to like: another ball-tamperer and a blubber of crocodile tears to boot.

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Nonetheless, the booing and apparent pleasure at his suffering, at Lord’s of all places, was inexcusable.