England players irrigate The Oval after ploughing it with scorchers

Several members of the England team urinating on the pitch at The Oval is bound to p*** off many lovers of the “gentleman’s game”, but could serve as further proof of the gradual reverse-osmosis process taking place in the former Empire. After all, the issue of public urination hardly raises an official stink in many of its former colonies — though it is popularly deemed a “nuisance” in India. In England though, it has still not been reduced to a mere piddling matter, so the cricketers’ actions have rightly led to the rechristening of this edition of the biennial England-Australia face-off as The Splashes. It could also result in their falling foul of the UK’s 1986 Public Order Act (under the category of “disorderly behaviour”) as well as other laws and bylaws.

The precedent has been set just last May when a magistrate’s court in London convicted a man who urinated outside a house for “littering offences” under the Environmental Protection Act, 1990, and ordered him to pay fines totalling £195, considerably redefining the phrase “spending a penny”.

While this is certainly not a wee offence, the England players could always aver that they were merely making belated amends for the dry and dusty pitches that the visiting Australians — particularly the fast bowlers — complained about throughout the series.