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The second Ashes Test at Lord's is taking place to a backdrop of badmouthing from both sides, but can words make a difference to the result? Cricket writer Gideon Haigh gives an Australian's guide to sledging.

Shane Warne had a knack of knowing which players could be sledged

True story: a few days after arriving in England this year, I was enticed into playing a game of village cricket, on the prettiest ground imaginable at Bayford in Hertfordshire.

The grass was greener and the pitch slower than I was used to, and it took me a little while to realise what else was missing.

Damn, it was so quiet - no banter, no backchat, and certainly no sledging. I found myself thinking: "Will someone please call me a convict, or make a joke about Neighbours already?"

In fact, I'm going to blame it for getting out in the 20s. Batting was just too jolly pleasant.

Unpleasant play

The customs of a new country always make one reflect on those of one's own.

Australian cricket, I grasped anew, is a noisy place, with sledging a soundtrack even at the humble level I play it.

And no wonder, I thought, that the subject is such a hardy perennial of encounters between Australia and England, two nations divided by a common game, who tend to exaggerate their differences because they are so similar.

Sledging is often assumed to be all about barbed exchanges on the field, of the kind that took place between Mark Waugh, whose brother Steve captained the team, to Jimmy Ormond in 2001.

"Mate, what are you doing out here? There's no way you're good enough to play for England," Waugh politely inquired of Ormond.

"Maybe not," Ormond replied. "But at least I'm the best player in my own family."

Sledging players like Brian Lara can often prove counter-productive

Relatively little sledging is aimed directly at opponents. Sledging in the field is more often a conversation of which the batsman is the subject: "He didn't play that well. Looks like he's worried by the short ball"; "The pitch is breaking up. I wouldn't want to be batting with those footmarks"; "This bloke's looking for red inks. The captain thinks he's playing for his average."

Everyone knows how annoying it is to be spoken of in the third person in one's presence - imagine how unsettling it can be while you're trying to deal with a ball flying around at 90mph, when you maybe need a good score, or it's vital for you to hang around.

Not bothered

By the time they have reached the top level, however, most players are already pretty well inured to such treatment.

Australian batsman Steve Waugh always said, with some foundation, that sledging was seldom really effective at cricket's highest reaches: good players weren't bothered by it; bad players would get out anyway.

He noted that he encountered more belligerent behaviour when he played with his grade team Bankstown than he did representing Australia.

Mark Ramprakash is said to have been a persistent victim of Warne's taunts

Sledging, in fact, has another element that's less to do with putting an opponent off his game.

Shane Warne, a past master of the pungent putdown, had an acute sense of those susceptible to it - in his time, the hapless Daryl Cullinan and Mark Ramprakash were repeat victims.

But he used it primarily to stimulate his own competitive juices, and to involve his close catchers in the struggle.

Nor would he sledge rivals like Sachin Tendulkar, whom it was a waste of breath to bad mouth, or Brian Lara, whom it was believed thrived on an atmosphere of antagonism.

With some rivals, in fact, sledging can be counterproductive.

Ian Healy, another champion chunterer, tells a story of when the Australians were playing in Sri Lanka in the 1990s.

Asanka Gurusinha had dug himself a hole against the spinners, trying to turn everything to leg. "Any danger of you playing straight, pal?" chirped Healy. Gurusinha turned, smiled, and next over, playing immaculately straight, hit everything in the middle of the bat. As they changed ends, Mark Taylor asked Healy sardonically: "Any danger of you shutting up?"

Sledging, too, is nothing without a threat to enlarge. The Australians have earned a reputation as the benchmark of verbal aggression in the last 20 years partly because they also play aggressive cricket.

Yet sometimes the toughest cricket is that played in an environment of silence.

On the eve of a Lord's Test, it's worth casting one's mind back four years to that riveting first session when Australian blood - specifically Ricky Ponting's - was spilt by the knockout bowling of Steve Harmison.

What telegraphed English intent was not a verbal barrage - it was that when Ponting was hit, nobody in the field said a word or made a move. The English did what came naturally. As I can now corroborate, that's actually quite off-putting.

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