An England bowler laid out a New Zealand batsman and the sky darkened and the gods grew angry and saw fit to punish the England cricket team. And although no law was broken, cricket united in condemnation of England and the actions of its dastardly team. Rum business, but that's cricket for you. All sports are a rum do, but cricket has always been the rummest do of all.

Ryan Sidebottom went for the ball, Grant Elliott fell over him, Ian Bell lobbed the ball to Kevin Pietersen, who took the bails off. G.D. Elliott run out 24 - perfectly legal, what's wrong with that? Well, cricket replies, if you don't know, we can't tell you. I tried to explain this to an American sportswriter in the Wimbledon press-room. I mean, look, Art, it's not the sort of thing a chap does. Baseball chaps, yes; cricket chaps, no.

The England players cultivate the image of hardmen in the manner of the great dandies of history, but they find themselves looking not hard but like cads and bounders. We all hate them and we are all glad that they lost, especially because they lost as a result of what in other circumstances would be condemned everywhere as a total breakdown of fielding discipline.

It seems to me that there is not one problem but three. The first is the rules, or rather, because this is cricket, the Laws. It is generally accepted in most sports that rules must be pushed to the limit and if you go beyond that limit you get punished. Fine. But if that were all, there would be no problem with the England cricket team.

There is a secondary system of judging behaviour - that of convention. In professional cricket, not walking when you know you are out is considered acceptable. Mike Atherton, the Chief Cricket Correspondent of The Times, will defend this view with the utmost rigour. And, indeed, in one of the most famous passages of his career he gloved a ball from Allan Donald, the South Africa fast bowler, to the wicketkeeper and stayed on to continue his otherwise glorious defiance. But does that make it all right?

For there is also a third system. It is supposed to transcend both the Laws and the conventions. The Spirit of Cricket: it is a huge phrase. There is an attempt to get the Spirit down on paper in the preamble to the Laws. It is full of stuff such as “set the tone” and “respect” and “traditional values”. In other words, no one is sure what the Spirit of Cricket actually is, although everyone agrees that it matters.

Not all sports have a Spirit, at least not in the demanding and self-conscious way that cricket does. In football we in Britain think that diving and faking are against the spirit of the game; in other countries faking is accepted. At the World Cup of 2002, Rivaldo, the Brazil player, was struck in the thigh by a ball kicked at him in anger by Hakan Unsal, a Turkey player. Rivaldo at once went down writhing and clutching his face and Unsal was sent off. The Brazilian said afterwards: “I am not sorry about anything.”

The idea that there should be special standards of behaviour for people who play sport makes no sense in many cultures. But cricket has always been as much a system of morality as a game. C.L.R. James wrote that the way that cricket demanded higher standards of behaviour than real life was a powerful factor in the sport's attraction for him. The idea that a wrongful act “just isn't cricket” has passed into language. No one says “that's just not football”. The intertwining of cricket and morality is part of our culture and, what's more, it is part of the culture, in differing forms, of all cricket-playing countries.

That's why the Pakistan team were so outraged when they were accused of ball-tampering. It wasn't the overt accusation that they had broken the Law, it was the implicit accusation that they had gone against the Spirit of Cricket.

These implicit accusations have led to most of the great rows in cricket history. Australians may not have introduced the not-walking thing, but they certainly institutionalised it, and that was seen by the English as a moral affront. But the English invented Bodyline, and that is still seen by some as the most colossal offence against the spirit of the game that cricket has seen.

Australian players invented the term “sledging”. These days sledging is an essential aspect of the England dandies' hardman approach to the game. It is a convention accepted by players worldwide, so it goes on. It is not specifically against the Laws, but it contravenes this high and elusive thing called the Spirit of Cricket.

There are strange, undefined areas in all three of these models for behaviour. Running between the wickets is where these problems make themselves clear. It has become an increasingly fraught aspect of the game and in his Editor's Notes in this year's Wisden, Scyld Berry wrote that it will lead to violence if not regulated. Suppose Wednesday's incident happened in one of the winner-takes-all, million-bucks-a-man Stanford cricket matches. Would England withdraw their appeal, recall the batsman? Can the Spirit survive the million-buck test?

These days batsmen are coached to block the fielder's view of the stumps as they run. You can see them swerving as they move, to put the run-out out of the equation. That is why it is commonplace for a batsman to be struck by the ball, when it was once a rarity. It is accepted, it is a convention, but it is not only against the spirit of the game, it is also against the Laws. A batsman who deliberately blocks off the stumps should be out “obstructing the field”.

And although the New Zealanders took the moral high ground this week, they were guilty of a greater offence when they ran out Muttiah Muralitharan a couple of years ago. Muralitharan completed a run, then stepped out of his ground to congratulate Kumar Sangakkara for making a century. The Kiwis broke the stumps and didn't withdraw the appeal.

The problem is not England but the massive tensions that exist in cricket between the three ways on which the behaviour of the players is judged. We are preparing for million-dollar matches while requiring behaviour of Edwardian courtesy and restraint. These tensions are enthralling but highly dangerous. The depth of feeling aroused by a minor incident in a pretty humdrum one-dayer makes this clear. The greater the stakes, the greater the tensions.

What must be done without delay is to regularise the Laws about running between the wickets because that is where physical contact can occur. You cannot rely on courtesy and restraint, especially not when there is a million bucks at stake. Wisden suggested running lanes; certainly, we need some kind of format in which every player understands and knows his place.

Cricket has always been one of the most controversial sports because of its complexity, because of its colonial history and above all because of its impenetrable moral traditions. Everyone believes with the utmost sincerity that the Spirit of Cricket should be guarded and succoured and cherished. The only problem is that no one knows exactly what it is. Until it is broken, of course.