A sneaky beaky is a hand you play when you have no hand and the person you're playing has no idea about the game you're playing. I was beaten by a good confident sneaky beaky until I was about 10 and I realised what he was doing.

One might ask what a father is doing teaching his daughter poker at the tender age of five, let alone condoning cheating, but he's also the man who taught me to bowl leg spin and box. On no occasion where I've been partaking in something that needed either of those two skills have I cheated. Indeed cheaters, on the whole, should give themselves an uppercut.

Chin out Steve Smith. You've been dealt a few of those these past few days and you deserve every knock.

It's not just cricket.

But before I get all high and mighty I'll own up to a few more things. I've been known to use a phone at trivia nights on the rare occasion where I know I should know the answer but it eludes me. I may have swapped some Scrabble letters over while my mum wasn't looking once or twice. Occasionally my golf score is one or two short but I put that down to an inability to count on the run. Monopoly is no fun unless you approach it with all the morality of Donald Trump doing property deals.

Hardly events to rival the darkest day in Australian sport.

So I started to think a little harder. Have I ever cheated on a sports field in a sanctioned match? Is cheating bending the rules? Is it cheating when you don't get caught? Is it cheating when, in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to change the result?

I like to bend the rules, push the laws to the limit. I sometimes work with the idea that it's not actually a rule until the umpire blows the whistle and points the other way. But I don't think that's cheating.

I can say, hand on sweaty shinpad, that I have never cheated in a game of hockey (waiting now for the emails to start to prove me otherwise). I may not have owned up to a foot in the circle, or dragged a ball back in field that may have been out. But that's hardly cheating.

Watching junior rugby, a sport whose laws are open to interpretation at the best of times, it's interesting to watch some clubs actively encourage their boys to play as close to the limit, if not slightly past, of the laws. How do you explain to a young halfback, a gentle well-mannered obedient boy (and, you're right, my son's no halfback) that he doesn't have to put the ball in the middle of the tunnel in a scrum just because that's the law. Particularly when you're losing every scrum.

Indeed, how do you explain to children, in the aftermath of this week, just what is right and what is wrong when it comes to gaining an advantage on the sporting field?

Fans have posted pictures of their children, dressed in their whites, wondering what they're going to tell them.

Here's what you tell you them. Sometimes people make mistakes, really stupid mistakes. Sometimes people think they're above the law, think they can get away with anything. Sometimes people don't know the meaning of the word humble. Sometimes you will stuff up and fail, fail yourself and your mates.

To Smith's credit, he owned up in his own way. One thing I tell my kids is that if you stuff up, whether you deliberately choose to make a bad decision, or just find yourself caught up in one, own it. Don't lie, that's just making it all worse. Own your mistakes. Learn from your mistakes.

I hate to get into conversations about whether sports men and women should be held up as role models for our children. On the rare occasion yes. Usually no. On the whole our athletes, whatever sport they are playing, are just regular people with some physical skill.

But it will be interesting to see how this whole thing rolls out in backyards across Australia next summer - and in all likelihood we'll all have forgotten about it by then - whether Australian cricket will suffer.

Because let's face it. Who hasn't cheated in backyard cricket? Taped a ball, soaked it in the dog's water bowl, made up rules as you go along, sledged like there's no tomorrow, bowled hard full tosses at your little sister's head.

But once you don that baggy green surely you're held up to a completely different level of what's right and wrong. Or perhaps once you're playing cricket in front of 30 televisions cameras that's where things get murky.

Has the game's integrity been shaken to the core, or have we been pushing the limits all along and this was just Australia's time to get caught?