I've got to stop following the England cricket team on the telly.

I find it a uniquely dispiriting experience.

Watching the same players make the same mistakes over and over (ha) again is really depressing.

As I write they are being battered and humiliated by Australia and look certain to be rolled over and knocked out.

What is it about England players that makes them capitulate so easily when the prize is so near? Ashes aside.

I think I know.

I think they must have some sort of Englishness DNA in them that makes trying "too" hard to win trigger a genetic response of making them feel unsporting and a little bit embarrassed.

Well most cricketers - BUT NOT ALL *sigh* - I suppose come from a bit of a posho background.

Private schools and privilege.

Yet you might think that the uber-competitive grounding of pushy, aspiring parents, a school governing board made up largely of the local Tory party and roughneck but rich self-made businessmen, would see the WIN-at-all-costs brainwashing become second-nature.

Well they must do, be posh and that, cos I never so much as even laid eyes on a cricket bat at school for the entire time I was there.

It was bloody football or nothing.

Which, on reflection, suited our pervy gym teacher who used to "test" our bodies for "wetness" with a stroke of his hand from neck to bum as we came out of the showers.

He got away with it by the hilarious pretence that it was the only way of checking we'd been under the water jets. I imagine that in 2009, as opposed to 1974, he'd be looking at a couple of years in chokey quicker than you could say "sicko".

But back then, well. You know what boys are like.

They'd rather sit at their desks caked in mud, blood and sweat than ever take a shower. It was important, do you see, that he checked.

But what the hell? EVERYONE'S sports teacher was a perv in those days.

Anyway, as usual, I digress appallingly and the sad old bastard is long dead.

Where were we? Oh yeah.

The point I was trying to get to was that, perhaps the Will to Lose demonstrated by our toothless cricketers is a latent reaction to all the horror of being pressed and bullied and mentally fucked-over in their early years?

Glib?

Oh yeah.