A losing streak is bad for the soul of a nation

Absenteeism, disorder, drunkenness and domestic abuse will have soared over the past week

Sometimes photographs capturing different events can tell more or less the same story. There is, for example, an obvious thematic connection between this week's photograph of an assistant at the Royal Academy removing the defaced portrait of David Beckham and that of a middle-aged man in a Union Jack hat, praying, eyes closed, at Wimbledon to a god who (surely the man must have known this) always favours Croatian tennis players when they play Tim Henman.

Sometimes photographs capturing different events can tell more or less the same story. There is, for example, an obvious thematic connection between this week's photograph of an assistant at the Royal Academy removing the defaced portrait of David Beckham and that of a middle-aged man in a Union Jack hat, praying, eyes closed, at Wimbledon to a god who (surely the man must have known this) always favours Croatian tennis players when they play Tim Henman.

Elsewhere, newspaper readers can enjoy shots of yesterday's heroes of cricket and rugby looking bewildered as they have crashed to earth. Or footage of enraged, glassy-eyed football fans baying for Portuguese blood outside a pub in Thetford. There are no photographs as yet of the football referee Urs Meier - he is currently in hiding and under police protection having received death threats from English sports enthusiasts.

Many of us, clearly, are in pain. We are suffering from that niggling, recurrent sports injury: not winning. Even those who pretend to be unaffected by the way our national sporting representatives have played their traditional role, that of doing well but not well enough, are often concealing an unspoken anger. Why us? That's what we want to know. How is it always our key players who get injured/ receive dodgy decisions/get drawn against a skinny Croatian beanpole who makes us look stupid?

There is a grown-up response to sporting setbacks and, at times like these, it tends to get repeated with the weary insincerity of Anglicans muttering the Creed. It is only a game. We have done very well to get this far. At least we lost with dignity. It is a sign of our maturity as nation that we are not hung up on winning at all cost. We provide excellent referees.

There may be countries in the world in which this sane, adult approach to competitive games prevails but, self-evidently, ours is not one of them. We need to win, just now and then, to make us feel alive. If we lose too often, we want to go out and hurt someone. Repeated disappointment can scar a personality, and so it is with a nation, but multiplied millions of times.

There will have been a slump in productivity over the past week. Absenteeism will have soared, and so will instances of drunkenness, disorder and, probably, domestic abuse. There is a limit to the number of times a society can have its hopes raised, and then dashed, without some collateral damage taking place.

And the pain of losing feeds on itself. Such is the national self-doubt of our sportsmen that, the nearer they come to achieving something, the more convinced they are that failure is waiting around the next corner. When any other team goes a goal up, they smell victory; when a British team does, they start looking over their shoulder in the panic-stricken certainty of defeat. The despairing weight of a nation's hopes takes poor old Henman to a quarter-final but then he, and his fans, freeze. They know what is ahead. They are English, after all.

These are not trivial matters. Lack of self-confidence affects the politics and the economics of a nation. The moment has come for a brave government to look at the achievements of, say, Boris Yeltsin in reviving the Russian talent for tennis and to admit that winning at sport is a high national priority, deserving of a major political initiative.

The easy part - one would hope, at least - will be to stop schools and councils selling off their land to profit-crazed supermarkets who then sell junk food. There is a connection, small but real, between sport as a source of fun and exercise and sport as a matter of national salvation.

New Labour would probably subscribe to an inclusive sport-for-all policy without too much difficulty. The next step, that of ruthlessly separating the truly talented from the amiable footlers, and then pouring national resources into the cultivation of a sporting élite, may be more difficult to sell.

Some will detect undertones of creepy East German obsessiveness, but the fact is that most successful sporting nations adopt a similar approach. Australians like to present themselves as sports-lovers, but for most this extends no further than watching sport on TV. The truly gifted, meanwhile, benefit from a process of benign hot-housing.

A daring and thoroughly sensible policy would be to lure the best sporting talent from less wealthy nations to Britain with offers of money, facilities, the chance to meet the Queen, or whatever they want. Not only would we start winning competitions but, as we cheered on some great national champion who could hardly speak English, barriers of prejudice would collapse. Just as our wealthiest football teams now compete internationally, thanks to the simple expedient of buying the best foreign players, so other sports would enjoy a revival in fortunes.

The national mood would change. There would be new spirit of vitality and optimism. The defeated cynicism of little Englanders would wither on the vine. Sport can heal our wounds - but only if we start winning.

terblacker@aol.com