In the week when two Wycombe Wanderers fans were given stadium bans for respectively possession of a pyrotechnic device and racist behaviour, it is interesting to compare the way our major sports are played and watched.

To say that the issue is a complex one is perhaps an understatement. If you look at how cricket, football and rugby are played and watched, there are startling differences. 

In football, the fans of opposing teams are routinely separated and on many occasions a buffer zone is needed to keep the potential powder kegs them apart, manned by security and sometimes police.

Even Adams Park, where the well behaved fans rarely do much more than cast doubt on the referee’s ancestry and home and away fans mingle safely outside the ground for the majority of the time, there are ‘derby’ matches where policemen on horseback are on duty to ensure that the tribalism doesn’t ignite into something dangerous as the disgruntled or excessively triumphant spill out into the cold night air with a long tiring journey ahead of them.

However many teams have followers who routinely cause concern and some of their chants at football grounds do not encourage parents to bring their children to matches.

Rugby on the other hand is a sport where the participants routinely finish a match lacking the seven bells they arrived with and covered in blood and mud; but the fans are not segregated and happily drink together and can support their teams without any desire to eviscerate or denigrate the opposition; and aside from the sight of the bloody but unbowed crashing their skulls together there is nothing about the sport to discourage parents from bringing their children along.

Then there is cricket, the most genteel of team sports we are traditionally led to believe, where players and barmy armies alike conduct themselves in an exemplary way for most of the time.

However, when the Ashes are being played the usually amiable Australian nation metamorphoses into a frenzy of words verging on incitement to Pomicide.

Mild-mannered Ozzie bowlers muttering darkly about ending England players’ careers and their press excoriating our team at every opportunity is a surprising prelude to a contact free gentleman’s sport.

It would seem that the passion in sport is expressed as the exact opposite of the level of pain that can be inflicted legitimately on the pitch. Certainly a fertile ground for psychologists.