MY HUSBAND had a slight indentation on his nose which he attributed to the hazards of a misspent youth playing wicket-keeper for a local hospital cricket team. Nevertheless, along with the nasal re-adjustment came a lifelong belief that it was an activity imbued with an high degree of sportsmanship. Most cricket-lovers share that view, which helps explain the shockwaves following alleged balltampering in the England v Pakistan test match.

I have little doubt that the game encompasses some dark arts: previous rows have ranged from deliberate scuffing with grit to seam damage by finger nails. The notorious "bodyline" bowling of England's Harold Larwood - when the batsmen's heads seemed more in the target zone than their wickets in a 1933 Ashes match - is still the stuff of verbal brawls. But this latest furore encompasses other agendas, not least the suggestion one of the umpires may have behaved dishonourably because of personal prejudice.

It occurs at a time when our collective belief in sportsmanship across a whole range of games has never been at a lower ebb. Just 24 hours before the test debacle, the US sprint star, Marion Jones, found years of rumours apparently confirmed by a positive drug test on the first half of a recent sample. The day before that, British relay medallist Darren Campbell repeated his belief that team-mate Dwain Chambers, and other athletes who had served bans for taking performance-enhancing substances, should not be rehabilitated if they continued to protect the shady operators who supplied and profited from the drugs scarring modern athletics.

The week before, the American winner of the Tour de France, the blue riband of cycling, also tested positive. These are high-profile forms of cheating, where the real race is between the superstars and the scientists in one lane and the national sports authorities and their testing regimes in another. And it is a race not just against the clock of ingenuity, but against the real possibility that integrity, like virginity, may prove a quality it is impossible to recreate. But there is also a culture of low-level cheating now endemic in sport, and spreading like a stain through the ranks of young participants.

The recent World Cup is a dispiriting example. Despite all the sound and fury beforehand about a campaign against the more cynical wares of the seasoned professionals, we still witnessed an epidemic of diving which was rarely punished. The excuse advanced - that an unsighted official without our benefit of close-up television might find it difficult to spot a fake tumble - just isn't acceptable. The divers need to be dispatched, and better an occasional innocent finds himself taking an early bath, than a procession of cheats and chancers marwhat should be a wonderful spectacle of skills.

I heard a radio interviewer the other morning joke that when playing football with his four-year-old son, the latter would practise diving. In truth, it's no laughing matter. And commentators are often complicit in the on-field crimes by dint of ludicrously partisan remarks. The highly publicised spat between domestic teammates Cristiano Ronaldo, playing for Portugal, and Wayne Rooney, for England, was discussed by English sports journalists in terms of whether a mischievous Ronaldo had provoked Man U's finest.

Nobody seemed much interested in the fact that Rooney was actually sent off for stamping an on opponent in the groin. More depressingly, the prodigiously talented Thierry Henry resorted to a dramatic fall clutching a face which had encountered no contact at all. Add in the more predictable histrionics of the usual soccer thespians, and you find yourself watching not a beautiful game, but a contest favouring those whose talents lie in sleekit varieties of cheating often carefully calculated to evade the sight of match officials. How are those who coach young talents supposed to encourage honest endeavour when they watch contemporary heroes indulging in villainous behaviour? It is often suggested that golf is one of the few clean sports left and, certainly, the odd green invasion by euphoric US Ryder Cup wives apart, its reputation has few stains at the highest level.

It is not unheard of for major stars to plead guilty to infringements nobody else has witnessed, while the rumbling over Colin Montgomerie's failure to replace a ball precisely after an overnight halt in play caused a major flurry in the golfing doo'cots. Even at club level, golf is unforgiving of the deady sin of cheating, routinely expelling members caught in the act. It has to be said that the bloke in question could be serially cheating on his wife without a flicker of disapproval from the blazerati. But just let him card a six instead of an eight and the game, as they say, is a bogey.