We seem to have a knack of spoiling our champions. What has happened to our Ashes-winning heroes of 2005? The same thing that happened to our rugby heroes of 2003. No sooner does a team do something utterly fabulous than it loses its way, forgets how to win, and the individuals become shadows of their former selves.
The similarities between the England cricket team and the England rugby team are remarkable. The cricketers beat Australia so memorably and so dramatically two summers back, and the rugby boys won the World Cup and were briefly the terror of the rugby-playing world. But both have suffered horrific defeats since then. It’s not as if either team has become slightly less good. They both changed, almost in the moment of victory, from superb to second-rate.
For the cricket team’s defeat against Australia this week was utterly wretched. The strutting champions of that great summer were unrecognisable. It was a performance of haunting ineptitude. And it was nothing to do with cricketing technicalities: the problems were in the minds of the players.
The rugby team have been even worse, suffering a series of hair-raising defeats in the autumn internationals. The cricketers have at least got four matches to go, a period in which they can fight for some kind of redemption.
There are plenty of dissimilarities, too. The rugby team reached its pinnacle at the World Cup — or to look more closely, in the summer that preceded the World Cup, when they went to Australia and New Zealand and beat both of them in their own backyards. But after the World Cup, significant players retired, others got injured, the coach moved on.
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With the cricket team, the coach is the same, the personnel pretty much the same, though there are three significant absentees in Michael Vaughan, the captain, Marcus Trescothick, the opener, and Simon Jones, the master of reverse swing. The circumstances for these teams are slightly different, then. But the great, unmissable similarity is the mindset.
Both have lost continuity. The winning of the big one did not establish a pattern of dominance: rather it opened the door for disappointment and defeat. It was as if the great victory was so awe-inspiring an achievement that nothing else in sport mattered any more. If the great victory created a momentum, it was all the wrong way: an unstoppable swinging towards disaster.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It is perfectly possible for teams to do great things and then to carry on doing them for some years. It is even possible for great teams to survive great changes in personnel, and become not a team but a dynasty. The history of sport is full of teams that went on and on, and the most obvious example are flying into Adelaide right now utterly convinced that the Poms are waiting to be crushed once again when the second Test starts on Friday.
The West Indies did it in cricket in the Eighties. Brazil continually do it in football. Ferrari did it in Formula One.
Domestically, Wigan did it in rugby league in the Eighties, Manchester United in football in the Nineties. Nothing lasts for ever, and in sport even the great empires must fall sooner rather than later. But England teams fail in the moment they are declared emperors.
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There seems to be no lust for English hegemony, no belief in England’s right to dominate the world. Even as the conquest is complete, the barbarian hordes are at the door and battering it down when they find it undefended. Why on earth should this be? Some would say that we celebrate our triumphs not wisely but too well. Perhaps our two all-conquering England teams suffered death by open-topped bus. Perhaps the adulation and the financial rewards that greet England’s great achievers in the big team sports soften them up. Perhaps, once you have entered the world of six-figure book deals, appearances on television, overpaid speaking assignments and the rest of the life of the professional celebrity, and when you live in the balmy climate of uncritical devotion, your morale begins to rot, and your hardness in the fight gets somehow lost.
But perhaps it’s something subtler than that. Perhaps the joy of reaching the dizziest peak inhibits further achievement. For these two great England teams, the great prize was the end of the road, not the beginning of the royal progress trodden by the greats, the road along which Tamburlaine was pulled in his carriage by the kings of the conquered nation. But the England teams do not think it is brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis. Rather, they become kings-in-exile, usurped, conquered, revolted against and otherwise done away with.
There are some that climb Everest and never want to see another mountain, and there are those that see Everest as a beginning, a starting point from which more peaks can be conquered. What the England cricket team need between now and the beginning of the match on Friday is communion with the spirit of Sir Steve Redgrave. Win, and having won, win again. Never slaked, never satisfied, never bored. For him, nothing in sport was ever enough.
The greats step off the open-topped bus unchanged: wanting more.