By Cavan Gallagher 

If anyone has been wondering why the sky has turned upside down, the seas to blood and the moon to cottage cheese lately, don’t worry: it’s just the Apocalypse happening. English athletes have been doing well lately and the planet just can’t handle it.

Although hardly a complete revolution as of yet (as anyone who watched this year’s Wimbledon would testify), England’s lot on the international sporting stage has nonetheless seen quite shocking signs of improvement. An excellent run at last year’s Olympics, in which they out-medalled Australia, has now been topped by August’s Ashes victory. Not only that but it was a convincing win, with Andrew Strauss’ men enjoying a 197-run bonanza on the final day of the series.

What’s with all this confident winning, people? You’re ENGLAND, for God’s sake!

That may be a facetious statement but one rooted in truths under whose yoke English sport fans have laboured for decades. If one was to look at English international sporting results over the last century or so, one could be tempted to believe that the most terrifying word in the English language is ‘semi-final’. British athletes’ perennial ability to get within groping distance of the top of the pile and no further suggests something far more permanent and far-reaching than them just not being very good. As a matter of fact, England has produced just as many world-class athletes over the last few decades as any other country. But what use are good athletes in a culture that has consistently been as in love with past glories as it is with current failures?

Nostalgia is a great bubble in which to live; not only do you get to prolong the euphoria of your best moments, it can shield you from the mediocrities you’re suffering right now. However, it can also have the dangerous side affect of setting those same mediocrities as a precedent, where those distant victories become so fervently cherished precisely because failure is completely expected in the now. What this creates is the worst kind of passive-aggressive fatalism, where one is happy to define themselves by what they once were while approaching their current situation with the sort of stoical nihilism you see in plane passengers the second before they crash into the side of a mountain. If one thing remains perpetually true, it’s that no nation embraces fatalism as a national trait like the English.

Over the course of Whingeing Pom’s existence we’ve offered tens of thousands of words of comparison between the Aussies and the English and more often than not we’ve found their differences peppered with many more similarities than is normally assumed. Sport is no different; sure, Aussies are more enthusiastic about sport and integrate it more into their lives both as a pastime and a cultural force, but when it comes to their country’s representation on the national stage both nations share one overarching aspect in their attitudes: big, stonking inferiority complexes. Both nations feel like the unpopular kid at the party and carry out that underdog mentality to the hilt. Every country that hosts a major international sporting event knows that if the sound of frenzied, boozy singing comes rolling down the street it means either the Aussies or the English have hit town (0r, if it’s accompanied with the sound of things breaking, just the English).

But, as with so many other things, this similarity contains its own subtle but crucial differences. Australia’s inferiority complex is that of a young nation that feels it still has something to prove, whereas England is a country that was once top of the heap and is still trying to adjust to the loss of that status. One is outspoken and aggressive, the other quieter and more passive. In many ways Britain is still mourning the loss of its empire and that confusion is never felt as keenly as when Australia, one of their primary imperial creations, routinely comes back to beat them at sport.

Or, to be more precise, their own sports. No other country has its homegrown sports so universally played as England’s. Cream of the crop is, of course, football/soccer/faintball (if you’re watching the more ‘interesting’ European teams), but if you factor in cricket, rugby and lawn tennis, a huge slice of global sports come from one country.

This has led the English to adopt a strange sense of entitlement when it comes to these sports; namely, as they invented them they should be the best in the world at them (or at least win all the time). This delusion of entitlement is never more obvious than in the face of the burst of romanticised tosh that spurts forth any time the year 1966 is mentioned in the English media, because there seems to be a law that that particular year can never be referenced, regardless of context, without yet another dewy-eyed fable about England’s one and only World Cup win cropping up. OUR win! In OUR sport! On OUR turf! Remember what we were saying about nostalgia at the top of the article?

The 1966 World Cup has been used as a placebo to dull the pain of mediocre England performances  for over forty years because of its almost storybook-like righteousness. Just nobody point out that that means the last time (well, the only time) England won the World Cup, the average footballer was a balding, mid-thirties chainsmoker who repaired tractor engines in his spare time – it tends to ruin the mystique somewhat and without mystique the England team would probably suffer a meltdown of Gazza-esque proportions.

Ultimately, though, the English have an instinctual belief that they should always be the best at the sports they invented: any other outcome is nothing less than an insult to nature itself. Obviously, nature has grown a pretty thick skin over the last few decades because this English dominance has been nowhere to be seen, with the Aussies arguably the biggest thorn in their side. Even the last bastion where they felt safe from defeat – soccer Itself – fell in 2003 when Australia beat a full-strength England side and the collective cry of “What the f**k?!?” momentarily lifted the British Isles into low earth orbit.

Instead, the English have followed a strict and depressingly predictable routine every time an international sporting event draws near. The preceding year sees a build-up of hype as the press once again rake the coals of past failures, beseeching England’s athletes to turn the corner and “Make Britain Great Again.TM” Stars are singled out, from Alan ‘God’ Shearer to Michael ‘Sicknote’ Owen to Tim ‘Tim’ Henman and granted near messianic status as the one great harbinger for England’s return to greatness. They enter the event amidst a cyclonic fanfare, promptly get knocked out in either the first round or the semi-final – and England reverts to its self-loathing fatalism until the next big event draws close and the whole wearisome cycle renews itself.

The problem can be summarized in two words: ‘Dunkirk spirit’. The English just love to romanticize failure and can be relied on to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with the eye of a marksman, and the fervour of a famine victim in a steakhouse. No keener is this propensity to cultivate tragedy felt than in sport – even Roger Draper, Chief Executive of the Lawn Tennis Association, blasted elements in British tennis who “would rather British players lost than won” in 2007.  His reason for saying this? Widespread opposition to a raft of reforms he proposed when he took charge of the LTA to shake up what he saw as a culture of mediocrity in British tennis that manifested itself in half-hearted training regimes, even for top players and rampant spending on a wild card system that essentially subsidised young players to participate in major events without ever having to develop the skill to earn their spots. Case in point: Alex Boganovic, who at the age of 25 has only this year been made exempt from wildcarding, a practice that has given him a free ticket to the last eight Wimbledons. He has been knocked out in the first round every year.

Has it worked? Considering that 2009 saw one of England’s worst Wimbledon showings in years, the answer has to be ‘no’. But you can’t blame Draper for trying because a change of attitude has been exactly what English sport has been needing for decades.

Indeed, Draper’s personal failings may end up secondary to his ultimate influence as it seems people were listening to him and trying similar approaches... And it actually seems to be working. England’s impressive Olympics haul last year has been credited to sweeping changes made in the methodology of athletics in Britain, changes that have been inspired by – wait for it – Australia. More precisely, the English remodelled their system based on the Australian Institute of Sport (which itself constituted a major restructure of Australian athletics after Oz’s dismal showing at the Montreal games in 1976), and have in recent years paid big bucks to hire Aussie coaches to mould a new generation of English athletes. One need only look at Great Britain’s Beijing tally – 47 medals in total, 19 gold – to see the fruits of their efforts.

On top of that, England’s Ashes win suggests that their biggest stumbling block – a lack of mental toughness – could finally be dissolving. The England team were decided underdogs going into the first Test, it being widely believed that under captain Andrew Strauss they were both underprepared and not cohesive enough to beat the Aussies. It seemed like the usual England playbook, i.e. hype yourselves up then fold at the first sign of trouble, was to be followed, yet again, to the letter. But that didn’t happen this time. Instead the Poms held the line and walked away with the Ashes, causing one of the bigger upsets in recent history. This, combined with Great Britain’s Olympics performance, suggests that change could well be afoot.

Frankly, to a humourist, the English psyche is like Disneyland. No other nation in the world has this history of dominance combined with such an endemic lack of self-esteem, a bizarre combination of self-importance and stoicism in the face of mediocrity that even this writer, a Geordie by birth, has never been able to fully grasp. In the international sporting scene, the English have always been the equivalent of a gone-to-seed lounge lizard skulking around a nightclub at 4am, simultaneously believing they can still cop off but secretly knowing it’s not in them anymore. They feel they belong, even feel they’re intrinsically better than everyone else present, but in some fundamental way are aware that they can’t compete. It’s a basic lack of confidence and fire that has let British sport suckle upon its own (distant) legacy, while failing to change for the better. While other countries were innovating and reinventing their own methods and reaching out to the young through school and social programs, England has always stuck to the same institutions and ‘Old Boys’ Networks’ and suffered in comparison.

But now, it seems, they might actually be learning. England’s Ashes victory has followed up on the promise of Beijing and suggested that English sport may be adopting a strange, quirky new habit: winning. It’s a wild and crazy kinda notion but it may just work...

If nothing else, at least the Barmy Army for once have been given something to be barmy about.