What is it about English sportsmen? Why, when the going gets tough, do they time and again respond with the most stereotyped negativity, an approach which seems almost to invite their demise?

The England footballers' staggeringly cautious tactics in Germany saw them regarded as the laughing stock of the tournament, the rugby union team became ever more narrow and predictable in the years following (and even the games immediately leading up to) their World Cup triumph in 2003. And this week the cricketers capped their own historically-trademarked propensity to collapse by somehow surrendering a position of apparent impregnability in Adelaide.

Laud Australia's astonishing fightback and the incomparable Shane Warne all you will, but they couldn't have done it without England. A lesson we all need to learn in life is to think and act positively - if we don't believe in ourselves, nobody else is likely to. Around the world, promising young sportsmen learn this earlier than most. In order to rise to the top in highly competitive sporting environs, they have to fight for all they are worth. Yet when English sportsmen fight, too often it isn't through a mentality of 'the best form of defence is attack', but instead adopting a dour, joyless approach which inevitably results in defeat.

The saddest thing about England's capitulation is that, after more than a decade of kow-towing to Australian dominance, they finally appeared to have absorbed this lesson only last year. The bouncer which Steve Harmison bowled to Matthew Hayden with the very first ball of the 2005 Ashes series at Lord's - and especially the astonishing, tide-turning accumulation of over 400 runs on the first day at Edgbaston - served notice to the opposition that this time England weren't in the least bit intimidated, and were very much up for the battle.

Such was the speed of their run-scoring, they managed to elevate a strategy developed by their opponents' brilliantly inventive captain Mark Taylor, in the mid-1990s, to still another level. Australia were shocked almost into submission as a result.

Yet on this tour, and even allowing for the absence of Michael Vaughan, Simon Jones and Marcus Trescothick, they have reverted to type, hoping for things to work out rather than making them happen. Like Nasser Hussain's notorious, craven decision to insert Australia at Brisbane four years ago, Harmison's opening ball in the first Test betrayed nothing but panic and Duncan Fletcher's misguided belief in Ashley Giles and Geraint Jones suggests he is wedded to the past (what worked in 2005) rather than the future.