Gunslingers are gone, and the Ashes tumult and shouting have died

IT'S a less macho game, with fewer verbals.

"THIS is war, same as usual," wrote The Guardian's cricket correspondent, Matthew Engel, before an Ashes series sometime in the 1980s. Would he say the same now? Possibly, but with a codicil.

The nature of the Ashes has not changed - it remains as important to players and spectators as it always was - but the nature of the battle has changed. Less hand-to-hand raw combat, now, it is a more gentrified battlefield.

The cover photograph for Australia, The Story of a Cricket Country, a recent compilation of cricket writing, was well chosen. It consisted of an iconic group of cricketers, in typical macho mode, wandering from the field during an Ashes Test in 1975: tousled hair, unruly moustaches, shirts hanging out of guts far removed from the modern chiselled equivalents. A bunch of gunslingers, almost, striding through the cricketing wild west.

As that photograph of 38 years ago suggests, cricket has become a less macho game. The bowlers today are not necessarily slower - indeed they may be on an average quicker than they were - but there is not quite the same physical threat as there once was, partly because of protective equipment and restrictions on bouncers, partly because bowling has become less visceral, and more scientific.

Nor is there the level of verbal intimidation that characterised Australian teams, in particular, of two generations ago. The advent of match referees, which has done much to gentrify player behaviour, was a direct consequence of how Allan Border's Australians played the game in the late 1980s and early 90s. Border had lost the Ashes too many times for his liking and decided, in 1989, that he would abandon the niceties. In Merv Hughes, David Boon, Geoff Lawson and Steve Waugh he had lieutenants perfectly suited to the task. Not that Boon or Waugh said that much. Boon would field at short-leg and say absolutely nothing, but he would stare at you all day long, unsmiling, so that you could feel his eyes drilling into your back as the bowler was running in. Waugh, well, he was different: a quiet word here, a quiet word there, all designed not to abuse but to get under your skin. It helped, of course, that for Waugh the 1989 series was one that truly established him as an international star.

But Hughes and Lawson, and to a lesser extent Craig McDermott, were different. Sledging, verbals, abuse - call it what you will - but it was direct, deliberate, deafening and ongoing. Once, when Gladstone Small was given out in a minor match in Albury-Wodonga, on the 1990-91 tour of Australia, Lawson ran all the way from fine-leg where he was fielding to give Small a foam-flecked gobful on the way off. It was the kind of behaviour that simply wouldn't be tolerated now, but back then anything went.

Hughes was the very visible face of Border's team in 1993, the battering ram with which Australia hoped to break down the defences of England's batsmen which were, in truth, not particularly well constructed. Most deliveries would be followed up by a prolonged follow-through, ending somewhere near the batsman's face, and a string of invective hurled through the bristle and the moustache, both designed to give the impression of lawlessness.

It meant that facing Australia was not simply about the game itself - how well you could defend, attack and whether your technique held up under the pressure applied by Test-class bowlers - but whether you could handle yourself under a verbal barrage. For me, a raw 21-year-old a month or two out of university, it was a challenge that had to be confronted without any real experience to fall back on. Batsmen found differing ways to deal with it - some struggled - but my own was not to answer back. Instead, a wry smile seemed to work as well as anything.

One thing that did help me deal with the abuse was to socialise with the Australian bowlers at the end of the game. This sounds counter-intuitive, and for many it was a step too far: why have a beer with a bloke who spends his whole day telling you how much he dislikes you? Yet, once you got past the bluster and the bullshit and sat down at the end of hostilities it was possible to see that, over a beer, these cricketers were the same as you. They had the same fears, hopes, worries, dreams and, crucially, nerves and uncertainties.

A blast from Merv could then be shaken off as a rite of passage for a young England batsman and nothing more. He didn't really hate you, you realised after one beer too many in the dressing room, and indeed he once let slip that he only really laced into batsmen he respected and rated, so in a way you could take the abuse as a tick in the right box. Only time to get worried was when it stopped.

But match referees put an end to all that. Good riddance, too, most cricket supporters would say. Instead, the verbals had to be dressed up as "mental disintegration" (to use Steve Waugh's phrase) and had to be uttered out of the corner of the mouth, or from behind a covering hand, or to a team-mate within the batsman's earshot so that the cameras could not see. Fast bowling became more scientific: Glenn McGrath's dismantling of batsmen's technique was in contrast to Merv's battering ram.

Eventually, of course, Australia's aura slipped, too: it officially disappeared at Edgbaston in 2009, when Andrew Strauss, the England captain, said it had.

Up until that point, for the previous two decades Australian cricket had dominated England not just on the field but off it, too.