Long ago, when the script was being written for these NBA finals, a 6ft 4in point guard from Australia with little dribbling ability, unconvincing facial hair and a shooting style somewhere between pick-up welterweight and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Along Came Polly probably figured low down the list of dramatis personae. But suddenly, it’s all about Delly. And not necessarily in a good way: with a few well-aimed elbows in last week’s Eastern Conference finals, Cleveland’s Matthew Dellavedova has turned himself from an obscure non-starting point guard into one of the most polarising basketball players in America. Much of the outrage has centred on the way in which Dellavedova tangled with Al Horford in Game 3, pushing himself into the Atlanta center’s knee – some say with deliberate aggression, others say not – as they fell to the floor in a way that provoked Horford to strike out in retaliation.

In Australia, we wouldn’t call this foul play. We’d call it a way of saying hello. Australia has given much to America: flat whites, the word “selfie”, smashed avocado on bread, a bunch of governments willing to go to war. Without Australia the quotient of annoying people in Williamsburg on a Saturday night would be greatly diminished; you’re welcome, America.

Now, finally, it seems this country – where I’ve lived for the past seven years – is getting to grips with perhaps Australia’s greatest export: the athlete with more hustle than skill. Dellavedova is the latest in a long line of Australian sportsmen for whom sport is less a platform for the display of individual virtuosity than an invitation to piss people off. He’s a wind-up merchant in the grand antipodean tradition, a proponent of the great Australian art of sporting niggle. America thinks what Dellavedova has done is bad. But America doesn’t even want to know how bad it can get.

To get a sense for what niggle is and how snugly Dellavedova fits into its rich and beautiful history, it’s important to look to the foundational examples. Lleyton Hewitt was a master of niggle, a man short on talent and big on attitude whose return of serve was just shaved for quality by his extreme verbal abrasiveness; more than anything the man argued his way to world No1. Pretty much every cricket player who has ever played for Australia was a proponent of niggle. (More on that later.) Even in basketball, former Australian players have shown a gift for the form. When Shane Heal so annoyed Charles Barkley with constant verballing during the meeting between Australian and the US at the 1996 Olympics that the legendary forward was compelled to mimic a gunshot at Heal during a timeout, Heal was simply speaking niggle to power.

George Gregan, the former captain of Australia’s rugby team, gave great niggle; when he taunted New Zealand’s players for tiring towards the end of the semi-final of the 2003 World Cup, a match Australia went on to win, that was niggle at its best. And in 2001, when rugby league player John Hopoate hit on the idea of supplementing his tackling style with the insertion of a finger up his opponent’s anus, he was taking niggle to a place niggle thought it would never go. Rugby league is a football code at once famously harsh and forgiving: history shows you can defecate in an opponent’s shoe, set fire to a child in a rubber dolphin suit or photograph yourself while being fellated by a dog and still go on to have a successful playing career in the sport. No surprise, then, that rugby league become Australia’s great home of niggle in the years since Hopoate’s Edison-like breakthrough. Testicle-grabbing and pulling at injured opponents’ stitches are now some of the handiest playing tactics in the league, and there’s an ongoing debate about the introduction of wrestling techniques in tackles (lifting, spearing opponents headfirst into the ground, grappling) that suggests niggle is not just alive in Australia today; it thrives. Other sports tell the same story: when Australian football player Hayden Ballantyne spends whole games doing little more than chirping away at his opponents until they punch him in the face, that’s both a victory for niggle, and a victory for Australia.

Niggle matters in a country like Australia partly because the very existence of life on the continent – isolated and arid – figures as a massive up yours to the basic laws of ecological viability. The country’s survival as a landmass is a triumph of nature-niggle. Dellavedova has been away from Australia for six years; his opponent in these finals, fellow Australian Andrew Bogut, has been in the US for over a decade. But even though these two players left the homeland when they were still teenagers, everything about the way they approach basketball – their brashness, their love of interference, the seemingly primal and inexhaustible need they feel to generate a reaction – marks them as pure products of Australia. Australia’s very Australianness – the peculiar rhythm of conversation and daily life, the energies of a people at once hard, resourceful and aspiring to something better – is so strong, it’s impossible not to be influenced by it when you grow up there. When I was 14, my science teacher used to call me “bloated carcass”. In another country, this might have been seen as inexcusable verbal abuse. But at the time, it all seemed like fair banter. I would walk into every class and ask my teacher, a skinny, impossibly pale man with an unfortunate penchant for wearing short-sleeved dress shirts, how his work experience stint at McDonald’s was coming along. To get along in Australia, a quick tongue and a thick skin can be helpful allies.

Urban Australia – the Australia most Australians live in – is an ordered, middle-class society of clean streets, cheap healthcare, degustation restaurants and teeming pubs. The rest of the country is a wonderland of blazing skies, mineral-rich plains, visually comic animals, and no people: an environment to make you wonder, in both sense of the term, a place of both delirious imagining and endless self-questioning. Put those two places – urban Australia and non-urban Australia – together and you have a country which invites its inhabitants to lives in which ambition and helplessness, self-belief and self-deprecation, entitlement and insecurity exist simultaneously, the sensation of a great and vital and immediate plenitude, our megawatt charm and impish charisma, giving way, just as quickly, to a feeling of discombobulation – what are we doing here? – and almost perfect insignificance. We all know that in the composition of this continent, the people are mere curlicues. This feeds the almost constant need we feel to make ourselves heard, to put ourselves forward. Docile, the landscape might forget we’re even there; vocal, we will survive.

In Australia it’s often said, almost always with pride, that we “punch above our weight” in world affairs: we’re a nation of 23 million but we’re a dominant force in the G20, we play an outsized role in the geopolitics of East Asia, we supply the main input into China’s economic model, we host global sporting tournaments with efficient aplomb, we have Cate Blanchett. It’s true, of course. We do punch above our weight. But this assumes that to get anything done in the first place, Australia needs to punch, and that choice of words says everything about the mindset that dominates, in large and small scale alike, the way Australia and its people set about their business. When we greet the world, we arrive in fight stance: fists up and fancy shorts on, fired up and ready to go. Antagonism is our default posture. When Tony Abbott, the prime minister, announced he was going to “shirtfront” Vladimir Putin at last year’s G20 meeting in Brisbane over the destruction of flight MH17, he sounded like a total dick. But he also sounded, it’s important to note, like a totally Australian dick, and in his easy application of the language of the schoolyard to global politics, he was merely expressing, whether consciously or not, a very Australian vision – grabby and thrusting, “We’re going to make an impression here, guys!” – of how to approach the world.

In this sense the links between sport and a broader sense of Australian nationhood are deep, and mutually nourishing. In democracies, the representative bodies usually offer a handy guide to national self-perception. In the US, Congress is stagey and oak-panelled, its deliberations tactical and self-important – there’s a seriousness to the place in line with the unique vocation this country sees for itself in the world. Australia’s parliament, aided by a protocol that places speech during parliamentary sessions beyond the reach of ordinary slander laws, operates in a different mode: permanent attack. It boosts the image of Australia as a place to get stuck in. Question time is a famously vicious, rowdy affair, and prime ministers are remembered as much for their famous parliamentary put-downs as their policy achievements. The most skilled parliamentary performer in recent decades was former prime minister Paul Keating. This was a man who once described a political opponent as “all tip and no iceberg”; in response to a question from the opposition leader as to why he refused to call an early election, a legitimate query in a country without fixed electoral terms, Keating replied: “Because, mate, I want to do you slowly.”

Much of this lust for verbal provocation – the vicious one-liner, the perfectly timed insult – has carried over to Australia’s sporting culture. Cricket in particular, with its leisurely playing schedule and abundance of close-in fielders, has become a fertile breeding ground for sledging, the art of mentally exhausting an opponent with relentless trash talk. Sledging and niggle are sibling pursuits. To be fair, “trash talk” probably undersells it. Sledging, in elegant hands, can be witty, imaginative, even somehow charming; but in Australia, it’s pretty much always straightforwardly nasty. Merv Hughes, a legendary fast bowler who played for the national cricket team in the 1980s, once claimed that a quarter of the wickets he took over the course of his career were down to sledging. Rarely are the words employed in sledges particularly subtle. Nor are they always necessarily directed at opponents: former captain Allan Border’s best sledge came against one of his own bowlers, proof that in Australia, competitive energies are always threatening to break off the rails of team solidarity and plunge into rank cannibalism. These demolition derby tactics have failed to endear Australia to the world; in sports with an international following -- cricket, rugby, soccer – it’s perhaps no surprise that the country is almost universally reviled as an opponent.

Dellavedova, of course, is a handy on-court talker. But sledging is not always about words. It’s about the aggression of a certain way of being physically present in the world – and the Cavs man embodies this aspect of sledging as much as its verbal element. Steve Waugh was the captain of the national cricket team from 1999 to 2004, a period in which Australia dominated the sport with a bullying, fat-batted dominance unlike anything seen before. Dead-eyed and thin-lipped, Waugh was a stalwart laconic hero in the mould Australia likes best: a man of such immense mental fortitude he rarely felt the need to open his mouth, much less let words emerge from it. His main conversational weapon was the squint: through a fractional shift in the many creases around his eyes, the dermal legacy of playing under the Australian sun in a time before enlightened views on sunscreen, he was able to express contempt for whichever opponent crossed his path with an economy not matched before or since in the history of sport. His best sledges, in this sense, often involved no words at all; he expressed his animating competitive fury via the mere physical projection of himself – the denseness and immovability of his body – on the field of play.

But on the rare occasions when Waugh was moved to talk, slinging the words out the corner of his mouth like a tobacco-chewing cowboy come to check on developments at the saloon door, the results were often spectacular. In 1995, Australia toured the West Indies. The hosts had lorded over world cricket for much of the previous two decades; Australia were the rising challengers. During one particularly hostile passage of a thrillingly tense series, the Australian faced up to his nemesis, Curtly Ambrose, at the time the most feared bowler in the world. Waugh was 5ft 6in; Ambrose was 6ft 7in and bowling at over 90 mph. Ambrose had been pummelling Waugh with short balls into the rib cage and head all day, playing on the theory – long held, later disproved – that the Australian was weak against any ball delivered north of his waist.

Waugh sized up his gigantic opponent, fixed him with The Squint – as dessicated in its despisal as ever, even through the grill of a protective helmet – and said, “What the fuck are you staring at?” Ambrose lost it. Waugh went on to seal a double century in the next match, the highest score of his career. Australia won the series, and became de facto world champions of cricket – a title they have rarely relinquished in the two decades since. The image of this chippy, flinty Australian – talented, yes, but not extravagantly so, and a master at masking his own technical deficiencies through the projection of an implacably emotionless hardness, through his sheer embodiment of grit – fronting up to this man-mastodon, the most hostile force in the sport, and spitting the words, “What the fuck are you staring at?” seemed to capture everything that was good and courageous and – appropriately so, given our present subject – cavalier about the Australian competitive spirit. Dellavedova is a child of this spirit.

“What the fuck are you staring at?” That’s the attitude Australia takes into the world, in sport as in much else. Waugh was not just a provocative presence on the field of play; he was also a great philosopher of provocation. As captain, he developed a theory of what he termed “mental disintegration,” whose guiding idea was that sport was as much a game played in the head as on the field. Waugh’s Australia pioneered a grand strategy in which all the techniques of niggle – sledging, relentless targeting of opponents’ weaknesses, a Rumsfeldian pushing of the boundaries of acceptable physical conduct – were deployed to effect the mental implosion of the opposition. It proved a devastating success, and mental disintegration has become an essential ingredient of the tactical landscape across all sports in Australia since.

This is an important point to remember today. When Matthew Dellavedova crashes into opponents’ knees, leaves a hand or a leg in a little too long as he’s trailing on the edge of a scuffle below the basket, then feigns indignation and plays the innocent, wide-eyed victim at the retaliation that inevitably results, he’s not playing dirty. He’s playing mental disintegration, at once a variant, a subset and a parent of niggle – a sport in which Australia has sometimes been matched, but never beaten. The irony is that when viewed against niggle’s rich history, Dellavedova – whose sole real offence has been to grow a stupid beard and put his buttocks in the way of people trying to achieve things in life – doesn’t even make the middle rank of its great proponents. Obstructionism by bum – bumstructionism, if you like – makes the Australian point guard no more than a journeyman in the history of niggle; indeed there’s an argument to be made that Dellavedova is not even especially good at the art. For such PG13 antics as his to become news in Australia, you’d expect the addition of a finger up the anus at the very least. The mildness of Dellavedova’s provocations only makes the histrionic local reaction to them – the impassioned denunciations, the drippingly earnest think pieces – all the more hilarious.

America, you’ve been played. But don’t worry, you’re not the first. And you certainly won’t be the last. You can have our point guards, you can borrow our baristas; but you will never match our niggle.