Do you come from a land down under?

If western civilization is to be saved, we must battle for the soul of test cricket.

For me, test cricket is the only sport still worth watching.

Just the timetable of a day's cricket is entrancing. Based on the routine of an English manor house, action only gets underway after ten. You break for lunch after only one session of two hours, followed by another session before afternoon tea. The calling of stumps at around six gives you enough time to shower and change for dinner. No need to rush - the next morning will be leisurely. What a day.

The sport itself is emblematic of the mystical flow of life itself. When you bat, success requires a virtual lifetime of application - but failure is only ever one ball away. Sometimes going out is your fault, but sometimes a ball just has your name on it. As a bowler, you can toil away for hours for just one wicket - when suddenly one moment of zip and intensity staggers a collapse in your opponents.

Cricket, like American baseball, also has important social ramifications.

First of all, cricket is so complex, you cannot possibly just figure it out in the streets with your friends. You must be initiated into the lore of the game, by brotherly or paternal figures.

They say you can measure social breakdown in the US by the decline of baseball - because of this crucial aspect of initiation. If somebody isn't throwing a ball with you in the backyard or taking the time to take you to an all-day match, you'll never figure the game out. Like life itself.

Finally, cricket is a life-like blend of the team and the individual.

You bat alone, but without a partnership, you'll never win.

You bowl alone, but without catchers, you'll never win.

The team and the individual require each other in such a way that the identity of both is never lost.

Teams both wear whites, and, traditionally, lunched together. Because when you play cricket you understand that this game is not some proxy for war, or, if it is, it's a war that recognises rules and civility still apply, and that without an opponent there is no game.

This is why the backlash against the Australian ball-tampering scandal has been so vehement and full of horror.

Not because nobody has ever tampered with the ball before.

And certainly not because nobody expected it from the Australians.

Rather, we are all shocked that the Australians systematically planned altering the ball with tools as a specific team strategy. This was no crime of passion.

Second of all, the conduct of this Australian team, the non-stop sledging, the win-at-all-costs mentality, belies the fact that many people have long expected this kind of thing from them. Finally, our fears have been confirmed. The best cricketing nation on earth might not even like the game - maybe they only like winning it.

Test cricket was never the perfect gentlemen's game. It has always been a tarnished sport, played by tarnished men. But the ideal of amateurism always remained, however we all so badly fell short of it. Even the tragedy of Hansie Cronje never involved cheating your opponent - but only yourself (and usually only within some lame ODIs nobody can even remember).

The sport has stumbled through many a crisis - but through each crisis the underlying fear has been that perhaps test cricket simply does not fit a modern world of professionalism, consumerism, and instant gratification.

This fresh scandal, from the land down under, from the territory of chaos always hovering beneath the social niceties of any civilized and fundamentally decent pursuit, seems to confirm these worst fears.

Is the game over?