Or maybe you’re watching athletics, a women’s 200 metres, where you are sure the eventual silver medallist puts her foot out of her lane as she comes into the final straight. And while you’re at it, a few replays of the second changeover in the men’s 4x100m heats indicate quite clearly that the eventual winners passed the baton illegally. Ping. Off goes an email to the International Association of Athletics Federations, and the medal order in these events is soon shuffling like re-scheduled services on Southern Rail.

Or how about this? You’re watching the final round of the ANA Inspiration tournament organised by the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), and you suddenly recall having a funny feeling about a putt taken by one of the players on the 17th hole during the previous day’s round. After replaying your recording a few times you are enormously proud to be able to confirm your intuition that a ball was placed a centimetre or so adrift of its marker and swiftly email the LPGA to enable justice to be served.

The news of a four-shot penalty - two for the infringement, and two for having incorrectly signed a third-round scorecard - has a gratifyingly dramatic effect on the player in question as they learn of the sanction while leading the event by two shots with six holes to play. After shock and tears have subsided, they manage to do enough to force a play-off, but lose on the opening hole.

Ridiculous, no? Well not entirely. The third turn of events actually happened on Sunday (April 2) and Lexi Thompson, of the United States, suffered the consequences.

Thompson’s treatment has aroused the ire of numerous fellow professionals. Tiger Woods - remember him? - tweeted during Sunday’s play: "Viewers at home should not be officials wearing stripes. Let’s go @Lexi, win this thing anyway."

Woods’s reaction was echoed by countless others from golf followers and underlined by subsequent comments from fellow professionals such as Jimmy Walker and Rickie Fowler.

"I think it's unfair," said Walker on the eve of the Masters in Augusta in Georgia. "There's no other sport where anybody can call in and say, 'Oh, that was a foul.' It just doesn't happen.

"I don't know why we're the exception, why you get to do that. No one gets to call the ins and outs in tennis. It just doesn't happen, so I think we need to change it."

"There's no question it should be ended," Fowler added. "I didn't think you can find one player that would say otherwise."

The governing bodies of golf, the United States Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient in Britain, are considering implementing a number of rule changes that would come into effect from 2019, with one of them appearing to end the circumstances in which Sunday’s embarrassing and traumatic outside intervention could again occur.

The element dealing with "Relying on player integrity" proposes: "A player’s ‘reasonable judgement’ when estimating or measuring a spot, point, line, area or distance will be upheld, even if video evidence later suggests it to be wrong;…"

The reaction of the LPGA Commissioner Mike Whan, however, has been instructive. While he sympathises with the unusual and distressing circumstances Thompson had to put up with - "I feel horrible for Lexi" - he has betrayed no hint of ambivalence about the correctness of the decision itself.

"This is one of those cases that the rules were applied 100 per cent correct as they're written today, for the rules of golf, but it doesn't mean that everybody doesn't feel horrible the next day," Whan told CNN.

"I can't overrule a rule that was accurately implemented by the rules of the game. There's nothing about this ruling that was wrong. In fact, it was 100 per cent right."

The Daily Telegraph golf correspondent Jamie Corrigan has described his view of the action in question during the third round, with Thompson’s approach putt appearing to end in "a depression".

He added: "Thompson approached the ball, which was little more than a foot away, and went to tap it in before, curiously, stopping. In one movement she marked the ball and replaced it, clearly in a different place, perhaps a centimetre from its original position."

Thompson’s later comment was: "It’s unfortunate what happened. I did not mean that at all. I didn’t realise I did that."

Corrigan concludes by quoting Britain’s Lee Westwood: "You know all this rules confusion could have been averted if Lexi just mastered the art of marking and replacing the ball in the same spot."

It’s a funny thing about golf. No sport is more susceptible to mind games and ploys that border upon unfair play. If you want to be persuaded of that you have only to consult the work published by British humourist Stephen Potter, who coined the phrase "Gamesmanship" and for whom golf was the paramount sporting environment in which to employ the subtle mental pressures that would allow the less than scrupulous player to profit against his unwary opponent.

One of the classic responses Potter suggested for those facing opponents who were clearly "in the zone" was to comment, once they had dispatched the ball on another prodigious journey down the fairway, that they would never hit a shot as good as that again in their life. At which point the hot-streak driver begins to assert the falsity of that prediction and starts, inexorably, to ruin his performance through over-exertion.

I can’t resist offering one more from many Potter approaches to golfing strategy: "[Do not] attempt to irritate partner by spending too long looking for your lost ball. This is unsporting. But good gamesmanship which is also very good sportsmanship can be practised if the gamesman makes a great and irritatingly prolonged parade of spending extra time looking for his opponent's ball."

This mental struggle can and often does lie at the heart of so many games of golf. And there are, to be sure, examples out there of when this ancient sport is despoiled by open cheating.

Boxer Oscar De La Hoya, for instance, recalled two instances when the man currently occupying the position as President of the United States broke the rules in consecutive holes when they played each other.

Semi-retired rock star Alice Cooper once answered a question about the "worst celebrity golf cheat" by saying "I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say."

That said, the sport of golf can, from this viewpoint on the sporting fairway, claim with some justice to be one of the cleanest of sports.

As Bobby Jones, the great US golfer, who won a unique grand slam of professional and amateur titles in Britain and the United States in 1930, once reflected: "The rewards of golf, and of life, too, I expect, are worth very little if you don’t play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules."

Is there any other sport out there that is as exacting about its standards, and whose standards are so universally supported by its players?  I am struggling to think of any….