Fear of failure...

Having never played any sport to a high level, I can only imagine what it must be like for England players to carry the weight of the fans’ expectations. But I’m pretty sure it can be counter-productive, if the fear of losing is stronger than the will to win.

I played cricket for maybe forty years. Nothing in life (and I mean nothing) has given me more guileless pleasure than the summer game. I wasn’t a duffer - I didn’t field third man at both ends - but I wasn’t a star either. I had my moments; hey, every dog has his day. What I loved was the competition: one team pitting itself against another, playing hard but fair. The pleasure, for me, lay in trying my best to win at every time of asking. I never liked friendly games, or ‘beer matches’, in which everyone gets a bat and everyone gets a bowl. That was boring. As long as everyone was trying their best to win, the result of the game would take care of itself. Some you win, some you lose.

If someone had told me that the next game was a “must win”, that “losing isn’t an option”, I doubt if I would have been able to play any better. More likely I would have been paralysed by the fear of failure. The England football team must have known how they would have been portrayed, on the back pages of the tabloid papers, if they failed to beat Iceland. And that just made losing ever more likely…

Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford...