James Lawton: A harsh lesson from golf to cricket and football: rules are not made to be broken

It was sad in one way, of course, but also refreshing to be reminded that golf, for all the human fallibility of some of its leading competitors, continues to separate itself so profoundly from most of its rivals. It does this by way of unswerving faith in the rule of law.

Golf fashions the rules, writes them down with considerable clarity, and, most vitally, sticks to them. It doesn't make them up as it goes along. It doesn't prevaricate over whether something is right or wrong. Cheating is not a matter of degree. It is beyond modification.

The latest immutable example came in the small hours of yesterday morning when Dustin Johnson was excluded from the play-off for the USPGA title in Wisconsin, one which he had appeared to qualify for so brilliantly just a few months after a catastrophic meltdown while coming home in the US Open.

Inevitably, the decision provoked bitter protest from the American fans, and much spluttering in the TV booths, not least from the often brilliantly witty but not always totally clear-headed David Feherty.

However, in golf there is no dodging an essential fact. Johnson broke the rules.

No doubt there were extenuating circumstances. When he grounded his club before striking the ball out of a "bunker" he contravened one of the basic laws of golf and it didn't matter that some of the sand-traps on the Whistling Straits lay-out, including the one that consumed Johnson, resemble those you see at places like St Andrews and Augusta about as much as the remnants of a battle scene in Lawrence of Arabia. However, within a few minutes of an extremely unpopular decision an American PGA official was effectively choking back a tide of indignation which if transferred to most other front-line sports would have flooded us with wearisome rhetoric for several days.

It was gently pointed out that the players, including Johnson, had been bombarded with warnings about the status of every sandy parcel of the course. It was a bunker. It was the number one warning on the local rules sheet – and was even pinned on to mirrors in the locker-room, something, surely, that might have been noticed by even the most committed narcissist.

Even the mortified Johnson, a laconic, agreeable figure in most circumstances, apparently, admitted, "I guess I should have looked at my rules sheet more closely." We can be pretty sure he will next time.

No doubt he will do it as keenly as Europe's Ryder Cup captain Colin Montgomerie and the iconic Gary Player have done ever since they fell the wrong side of the rule book – and paid the price in years of rumbling discontent and displeasure among their fellow professionals.

In Johnson's case the tendency has been more to cast him as a victim, an understandable enough reaction in all the circumstances. Certainly the cost of a major title could prove career-changing in a disastrous way. Undoubtedly, in all the pressure he was under in fighting to make not just the play-off but win the title outright by scoring par, he had little sensory encouragement to believe he was operating from a bunker. The grass was well trodden and the sand had more imprints than Brighton beach on a warm bank holiday. Yet the fact remained that Johnson broke a rule that, we can be sure, would have been applied just as vigorously had it been ignored by the eventual winner Martin Kaymer or any other contender.

This is the beauty of golf. There are no compromises, no toleration of the kind of hopelessly blurred line between what is legal and what is not that was so unacceptably visible again at the dawn of a new football season, when Liverpool manager Ray Hodgson spoke, serious-faced, about an appeal against the red card delivered to his new signing Joe Cole for his irresponsible tackle on an Arsenal player. Cole's tackle carried no malice, we were told solemnly and as if it made one iota of difference to the validity of the referee's decision.

Meanwhile, Stuart Broad, someone guilty of serial but often scarcely noted perversion of the spirit of cricket, sails into the third Test against Pakistan despite throwing the ball at an opponent in a fit of pique. Broad's only punishment was the deduction of half his match fee. Dustin Johnson paid for his mistake with the shattered possibility of a landmark major title win.

An outrageous dichotomy, you might say. Or then maybe it's just the difference between a sport fighting, come what may, to preserve its values – and another that isn't.

Capello's error was to indulge Beckham

Compliments to the author of the best line provoked by the tragi-comic controversy over Fabio Capello's long delayed announcement that the sun had probably set on David Beckham's international career. "He might have bitten off the head of a kitten," said Des Kelly of the Daily Mail.

What he also illuminated was the palsied state of the English football culture. Capello, with his fractured English and £6m pay cheque, has become the most convenient of sitting ducks.

The suspicion here has always been that Il Capo was badly compromised by the irrational English devotion to Beckham's celebrity, and perhaps his money-making potential, and that by playing along with it he abandoned a considerable amount of the high ground he achieved in a career of superb application and professional values as both a player and a coach.

The rest may indeed prove to be forlorn history now that the FA assures us that in future England will be in the hands of a native-born coach who speaks impeccable English. Presumably, the sniffer dogs are already seeking out such an elusive quarry.

Wenger must look closer to home for the real problem

The manic element in more or less everything Arsène Wenger crowded into his diatribe against the new regulation that Premier League clubs should restrict their 25-member first-team squads to a mere 17 foreign players was compounded in the most familiar way when he picked his team on Sunday.

There, once again, was the evidence of Wenger's working, week-by-week, season-by- season, contribution to the development of the English game. Six Frenchmen, a Spaniard, a Belgian, an Ivorian, a Russian and one homegrown 18-year-old in Jack Wilshere, who no doubt at the start would have been sharing the bench with his sole compatriot in the squad, Theo Walcott, if Cesc Fabregas hadn't been taken ill.

Situation pretty normal, of course, but you don't have to compromise your admiration for the football values of the Arsenal coach to suspect that his total failure in 14 years to develop a significant English dimension to his work at one of the nation's most prestigious clubs is not entirely rooted in the lack of an adequate domestic product.

"We have the situation," he declared, "when the richest people in the world are investing in football [here] and the Premier League can only think about keeping foreign players out. You cannot say that the richest man in India comes here and then you say you can only play with English players. They could ruin the best league in the world."

On the other hand, Arsène, they might just make it a real league based on something more than passing, speculative investment and a disregard for the long-term benefit of a national game – and a disenfranchised generation of English players.

Villa fans deserved Milner's farewell

Euphoria was understandably thin on the ground after the latest Premier League dawn but was anything more strained than the praise heaped on James Milner and Javier Mascherano for their committed performances on behalf of Aston Villa and Liverpool?

It was said that in view of their imminent departures to places like Manchester and Milan they showed great character in so ostensibly trying a leg.

By rough calculation Milner and Mascherano are paid around three times in a single week what the average British worker makes in a year. If we expect so little, in return for so much, how can anyone be shocked by the accumulating signs of football decadence?