Should we give a toss about the toss?

● Journalists behaving badly is a matter of misguided honour, so a Sri Lankan reporter covering that team’s tour to South Africa in 2016-17 copped a heap of flak from his Saffer colleagues.

Neither he nor us had anything to do with South Africa winning all three tests and all five one-day internationals but we didn’t think twice about telling him how crap “his” team were.

And when the Lankans got it together well enough to win the T20s 2-1 we told him why that didn’t matter: play properly in a proper format before you bother us with your ludicrous argument, fool.

All in good, clean pressbox fun, of course. No spouses were denigrated, no shoulder charges were meted out, no sandpaper was spirited into anyone’s underwear, and no retaliatory sanctimoniousness was tolerated.

So there was no surprise when, with the Sri Lankan’s prime abusers not having made South Africa’s tour there, this message from him fluttered into their inboxes: “Missing you guys, mainly because it would be nice to return the insults.”

With the South Africans playing cricket that would have got them a bollocking from a mini-cricket coach, he would have had ample opportunity.

How could it be that similar sets of players — 21 of the 31 involved this time were in the 2016-17 squads — could deliver such contrasting results?

The International Cricket Council (ICC) had a go: “There is serious concern about the current level of home-team interference in test-pitch preparation . . .”

In the past five years 54.9% of tests played have been won by the home team — 9.4% more than in the five years before.

The biggest climbers have been New Zealand, who won 63.64% of their home tests between 2013 and 2018, up from 15%. But the latter figure is skewed by the fact that 11 of those 20 tests were drawn.

And the champion backyard bullies in the past five years are . . .

Yup. That’s right. You guessed it. India are top with a winning percentage of 73.91, and it will add to the schadenfreude of sledging victims everywhere that Australia are next on 73.08%.

South Africa won 59.09% of the time at home in the first period and 62.96% in the second, and are sixth on the list.

Two teams have gone backwards in these terms, one of which is Zimbabwe. The other is England, who are 11.08% less successful at home these days than they were between 2008 and 2013.

But, overall, visiting teams are winning fewer games. What to do, if anything?

“. . . more than one [cricket] committee member believes that the toss should be automatically awarded to the visiting team in each match, though there are some others on the committee who do not share that view.”

That’s some of the rest of what the ICC said, and they’re serious: next year’s Ashes could be the first test series to be

If someone says [scrapping the toss] is against the traditional thing, he’s blind

tossless, which has been the norm in county cricket since 2016.

Feathers have been ruffled. Some of them belong to Allan Donald, these days Kent’s bowling coach, who told the Canterbury Journal: “I’m of the view that if you win the toss you should do what you need to do rather than rocking up knowing you are going to bowl.”

Then there’s Dale Steyn, who was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying: “Traditional cricket has gone out the window; T20 cricket has changed the game.

“If someone says [scrapping the toss] is going against the traditional thing, he’s blind.”

Donald and Steyn didn’t say the obvious: barring the kind of cheating we saw from groundsmen in India in 2015, if you prepare properly and play properly — neither of which South Africa have managed in Sri Lanka — your results will take care of themselves.

So, do you give a toss?