As sporting rivalries go, England and Australia remains oddly paradoxical: infused with a patina of goodwill, staked out around a homely selection of shared sporting activities, and by most measures at the more fraternal end of the range animosities. Except, that is, when things go wrong. For all the multifarious sense of good-natured simmer, there is also a history of intermittent sporting ferocity, a series of collisions that have marked what is one of the world’s oldest and most culturally nuanced sporting rivalries.

Rugby union is by nature a violent sport, but somehow when these two nations take the field the needle just seems to lurch to the right a little, leaping into the territory beyond the merely necessary and into something more profound. At the far end of the scale, the battle of Ballymore between Australia and a majority-English British and Irish Lions in 1989 was described by Mike Teague, who played in it, as “the most violent game of rugby that has ever been played”. This was a Test that began with a massive punch-up between the two scrum halves in the first minute. It went downhill all the way from there and came to reflect what was still at that time an enduringly raw postcolonial animosity.

A desire not just to win but also to exact revenge, to assert some form of wider cultural superiority, to win in a way that might feel like the end of something. If Australia has often looked to portray itself as a youthful, sunlit kind of place, freed from the lingering, pigeon-chested hierarchical neuroses of the old country, sport has presented not just an arena in which to exact a measure of symbolic revenge, but a place in which to define itself as decisively different, more muscular, forward-looking.

Similarly victory for either nation on the cricket field — in a sport of both technical skill and physical bravery — has rarely come unaccompanied by wider theorising on one nation’s moral, organisational and physical superiority over the other.

The most obvious occasion for this was of course the defining moment of 20th century Anglo-Aussie sporting relations, the ”Bodyline“ Ashes Test series of 1932–3, during which England captain Douglas Jardine instructed his fast bowlers, led by Harold Larwood, to attack Australia’s batsmen, and in particular the peerless Don Bradman, with short, hostile, leg-side bowling. This was an unambiguous kind of sporting warfare.

Dennis Lillee bowling for Australia against England during the Prudential Trophy at Edgbaston. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/EMPICS Sport

During the journey to Australia Jardine had instructed his players that they needed to actively “hate” and made at least one request that Bradman be referred to as ”the little bastard“. As Australia’s batsmen were repeatedly hit and bloodied, a riot was narrowly avoided at the Adelaide Oval after Australia’s captain was felled by a short ball from Larwood.

England won that series, causing a change in the laws of the game to prevent “leg-theory” bowling, but they were subjected to a kind of revenge 40 years later when a touring team led by Mike Denness was battered relentlessly by Australia’s fearsome fast-bowling pair, the ”twin terrors“ Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson.

Dennis Lillee bowling for Australia against England during the Prudential Trophy at Edgbaston. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/EMPICS Sport

“Never in the 98 years of Test cricket have batsmen been so grievously bruised and battered by ferocious, hostile, short-pitched balls,“ Wisden reported as two England batsmen suffered broken hands in their first innings of the series. Never has the furiously avenging, open-shirted beer-drinking Aussie Larrikin bloke extended such furious ancestral revenge through the mannered strictures of professional sport. The irony was not lost on the Australian captain at the time, Ian Chappell. His grandfather vice-captained the Aussie bodyline side.

Dennis Lillee bowling for Australia against England during the Prudential Trophy at Edgbaston. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/EMPICS Sport

And if the edge has faded from this, if perhaps there is less in the way of genuine proximity to genuine postcolonial animosity, the needle is still there.

Dennis Lillee bowling for Australia against England during the Prudential Trophy at Edgbaston. Photograph: S&G and Barratts/EMPICS Sport

The rivalry between the British cycling champions Victoria Pendleton and Australia’s Anna Meares has been as jarringly physical as anything seen inside a velodrome, carrying with it its own shades of English vanity — the beautifully-groomed Pendleton, princess of the saddle — against the concussively no-nonsense Aussie Mears. At the 2006 world championships Pendleton berated Mears as a rider who “likes to push rules” after she cut her off during the final. By the time Pendleton retired after the London Olympics of 2012 this was a sporting rivalry that looked to have run its course, fading into affectionate respect — just as that strain of genuinely vicious Anglo-Aussie sporting brutality now looks as passé as the old world itself, a hangover from more obviously oppositional times, perhaps even in its own way part of wider process of exorcism and catharsis.