And yet the England cricket team defend such idiocy. More, they take pride in it. The whole business of taunting, putting off, insulting all the things that go under the name of sledging has become a battleground in which ugliness and inanity struggle for supremacy.

The stump microphone picked up a classic piece of sledging wit during that second Test between England and India. "I'm driving a Porsche Carrera; what's your car?" Thus the exquisite Wildean wit of the modern England cricketer is laid bare.

It is, of course, the sort of remark you would expect from a Porsche driver, a Porsche being the naffest car ever manufactured. But is it a suitable remark to make to a man from a Third World nation who is a guest in your country? The combination of vulgarity and insensitivity is mind-numbing.

But the thing that really gets to me is that England cricketers seriously believe that sledging makes them better players. They prink and preen because they say bad things to people when they cannot fight back. Hard men, eh?

"It comes with the territory," Matt Prior, the England wicketkeeper, said. "It's international cricket, it's a hard game. We all want to win, we're all playing to win, so you're going to have banter." Prior is simply telling the world: "I'm well 'ard."

As a point of information, people who need to tell the world that they are well 'ard are not, in fact, 'ard at all. They are just mouthy gits. Real hard man don't need to tell you.

The England cricket team are suffering from confusion. The players believe to a man that behaving like an arsehole makes you a better cricketer. The fact is that it doesn't. It only makes you an arsehole.

Peter Moores, the England head coach and team director, has talked up his belief that his team should be more aggressive. That is interpreted by all perhaps even intended by him as charter to drop all reasonable standards of behaviour, as if serious sport can only ever take place in an atmosphere of festering playground antipathy.

This is not only untrue, it is not what we spectators want. One of the many great things about the Ashes series of 2005 was the respect between the players. The ultimate image of the series was Andrew Flintoff's moment of commiseration with Brett Lee after England's narrow win at Edgbaston in the second Test. We liked that that's how we want cricket played.

So what is Moores's response to the present outbreak of nonsense? "There is an issue about whether the stump mike should be so loud." No there is not, there is an issue about whether the England players should make such prats of themselves.

It's not as if it did them any good. Zaheer Khan, the man insulted by means of jellybeans, responded by taking five second-innings wickets as England slithered to defeat, leaving Michael Vaughan, the home team's captain, feebly trying to explain that, although Zaheer had played awfully well, it wasn't the jellybeans that had inspired him. Zaheer took the opposite view.

England didn't look well 'ard, they looked well pathetic. These people are supposed to be playing for England, they are supposed to be representing me.

How has it come about, then, this belief that bad manners and good cricket are inseparable? Australia, obviously. For years, England have believed that everything good in cricket is Australian and that the more Australian the England team can be, the more cricket matches they will win.

So England have copied the boasting and the taunting while failing to produce a Shane Warne or a Glenn McGrath. And it's contentious, I know, but I think Warne and McGrath did more to win cricket matches for Australia than any amount of mental disintegration inspired by Steve Waugh's sledging. England may lack the talent of Warne and McGrath, but they can certainly behave in an infantile and boorish fashion, and that's almost as good, isn't it?

Cricket is a game in which people talk. There's plenty of opportunity for it, after all. And I've played it. As a lapsed wicketkeeper, I'd say the strongest part of my game was the ability to suck my teeth loudly enough for the batsman to hear it 15 yards away after the ball had passed the bat.

Banter, seldom terribly edifying, is a part of cricket, on the village green and elsewhere. No one expects cricket to take place in a reverential hush and, amid the general din, no one is sure whether he is trying to encourage the bowler or disturb the batsman.

So there is a line to be drawn. I'd be inclined to draw it on purely aesthetic grounds: if it's ugly, childish and pathetic, it's time for the umpires to step in, as they are empowered to do. As Christopher Martin-Jenkins has pointed out on these pages before, a five-run penalty for an illegal attempt to put the batsman off is within the laws of the game.

The ICC should encourage umpires to take this on. It would be the direct opposite of what happened in tennis, when John McEnroe was making an idiot of himself. Then, tennis umpires let him throw his tantrums because they feared that defaulting him would make too much trouble. The ICC needs to grasp the nettle on this one because the players and coaches such as Moores don't even think they are behaving badly. No, they think they are being cool, they think they are being Real Men.

Me. I'd like to watch an England team who played good, aggressive cricket, rather than merely pretending to do so. Cricket is supposed to be aggressive: the increased aggression in the bowling of Ryan Sidebottom and Chris Tremlett this season has been good, not bad.

But these improvements are not dependent on throwing sweeties at batsmen or boasting about what kind of penis substitute you happen to drive. All the cult of sledging does is spoil the game for the spectators, who want to see a good match contested in a forthright, full-on, flat-out, aggressive, honourable, decent, grown-up way. If we don't get that, perhaps we will start to look elsewhere for our sporting pleasures.

I shall leave the last word to King Lune of Archenland, from The Chronicles of Narnia. His impetuous son insults an enemy who is brought before the court in chains. "Shame, Corin. Never taunt a man, save when he is stronger than you: then as you please."

(Revered sports writer Simon Barnes wrote this article on the Times).