Beyond despair

WHAT WAS the worst sporting moment this week? Now there's a question. It's been a week, after all, in which Joely Richardson and Sean Bean exhibited rather more athletic prowess that the whole of the England cricket team put together. A week in which Graham Taylor smiled when England were only beaten 2-1 by Germany. A week in which . . . but let's not get snarled up in gory details. Besides, how low must you go before you can stop wondering how much lower you can go?

What was interesting, though, was the general reaction to all these disasters. Having written a few weeks ago about how frustrating it is to find yourself in foreign parts when exciting sporting events are taking place at home, I spent last weekend in foreign parts doing everything humanly possible not to find out what was happening at Lord's. When some idiot finally told me, I was furious, both with the messenger, whom I vaguely remember kicking, and with England themselves.

As Ted, Keith and Graham give their daily press conferences, abnegating any responsibility and trying to convince everyone that calls for their instant death by slow torture are unnecessary just at this stage, it's clear that they don't realise the sheer anger that we fans feel at the team's woeful inadequacy. It's because we care so much that we wish to see Gooch's stomach ripped out with a potato peeler. If only they could understand that.

Except that the reaction of the Lord's crowd last week seems to have been rather less violent. A friend who witnessed the nightmare spoke movingly of the crowd's remarkably restrained behaviour. In any other country, the England cricketers would not have left the ground with their toenails intact. But at Lord's, everyone just carried on guzzling, so that by the time England were 193 for 9, they were so anaesthetised that it didn't matter any more.

Is this what we are coming to? Are we so inured to failure that we will not even murder representative teams that do not come up to scratch? But this defeatism is not just a cricket-related phenomenon. Years ago, when the England football team were beaten by Germany, there would be rioting in the streets, and the RAF would be put on full strike alert.

Nowadays, a 2-1 defeat is greeted not with disgust, but with relief that it wasn't 5-0. We are so defeated that we have even stopped complaining about John Barnes being picked. At Wimbledon, our expectations are so low that when someone British extends his opponent to the fifth set, it's front page news. If someone actually won the final there would be dancing in the streets.

How things have changed. Back in the old days, when Fred Trueman's eyebrows had not yet been granted full independence, any batsman who scored nought could later expect a damn good beating, and after a run of poor scores, ritual disembowelment in the members' dining room.

Such was the hard and tough world of first-class cricket. Now, in John Major's Britain, failure is its own reward - and usually gets you selected for the next Test.

The result is a whole nation of spectators whose teeth have been drawn, whose fire has been snuffed out. We watch them fail, we turn our backs, we have another gin and tonic. And this is the secret of our national decline. It is not the sportsmen. It is us, the spectators.

Just don't tell Ted Dexter, that's all. You never know, he might call for our resignations . . .