Come on, stand up for yourself. Be a man and play the game

Men are not admitting their limitations when they state their gender

● If you didn’t know that men — as opposed to women, boys, girls or meerkats — are contesting the test series between South Africa and Australia, you should by now.

“It’s a lot of men playing out there and you’re allowed to celebrate sometimes,” Vernon Philander said during the St George’s Park test. “Sometimes there’s a fine line about celebrating too hard.

“It’s a bunch of men playing this game. It would be a totally different ball-game if it was a bunch of schoolboys. We tend to take things personally.”

Other players have also reached for the M-word in response to questions about the poor standards of player behaviour in the series.

Among them Faf du Plessis who, when asked what all this manliness was about, joked, albeit not snidely: “We’re men and we play the game.”

Are these convincing explanations for why men can’t seem to play a game of cricket without resorting to Neanderthal conduct?

Or are they excuses — we’re men; we know not what we do?

What they should be is apologies, but they sound much more not sorry than sorry.

There’s a “boys will be boys” dismissiveness about how players from both sides have tried to rationalise the rampant and puerile swearing, shocking misogyny and, in one case, what would in a court of law be called assault that the series has had to endure.

Men are not admitting their limitations when they resort to stating their gender in answer to concerns over the way they have, or haven’t, done something.

Instead, they are proclaiming their superiority.

We’re men, dammit. That’s why. There’s something like pride in the fact that, even in 2018 and despite everything the namby-pamby International Cricket Council tries to throw at them, men are still in touch with their primal selves enough to be able to summon their basest behaviour at the flick of an emotional switch.

And no switch is as easily flicked as the mere mention of a woman who is close to them, particularly by an adversary.

Take it from a man, “Your mother sleeps with your father,” would start an all-out brawl if it was uttered on the dressing-room stairs.

This poisonous perversion has permeated the boundary, beyond which lurk pathetic husks of humans wearing Sonny Bill Williams masks and thinking they’re funny.

None of this is, of course, limited to cricket. The world has been messed up by men for centuries, and they have tended to blame women for their failures — or at least use them as justification for getting things badly wrong.

Hence, David Warner could not control his anger when his wife was apparently insulted by Quinton de Kock, who had himself been provoked by alleged comments about his wife and mother.

Of course, part of Warner’s defence for behaving as he did was that he was standing up for women.

Those damn women. Always causing problems in men’s lives. Once they were burned at the stake as witches. Now they are torched on social media.

It is not manly to stalk a cricket ground like some caveman sniffing the air for the scent of prey, and to react as if you have been attacked at a mention of what you decide is the wrong thing to say. It is, instead, evidence that evolution hasn’t made much progress.

It is also what does not happen when women play cricket. There is aggression aplenty in women’s cricket — watch Marizanne Kapp bowl and you will be in no doubt about that — and the sledging can be rougher than a goat’s knee. But there is also fine skill and wonderful competitiveness.

Women play cricket. Men don’t so much play cricket as try to punish it for being a game worth playing: how dare cricket think it can put an XI in front of us who think they are better than us?

Men are ruining a game that is played with more integrity by women.