At around 10pm on Wednesday night, I sat with my head in my hands in a pub in Chiswick knowing we had blown it. No, I was not concerned about events in Milan, I'm one of the few Londoners who is not a Manchester United fan. I was concerned that a season's hard work had gone up in smoke over one false move.

As captain of Hackney Chess Club second team's Middlesex League Division Three team, I take full responsibility. The other lads in the team were equally upset at what had gone on before that evening against the might of West London 2 in Chiswick Town Hall. But, to use Ron Atkinson parlance, at the end of the day I bottled it.

We went into the game with a simple equation. A win or draw over the eight boards would see us promoted to the lofty heights of Division Two, where the likes of Hendon 1 would await us. Defeat would let Hendon 2 sneak into the second promotion slot. A nation held its breath.

I managed to get a strong team out to posh Chiswick. But it all went wrong, horribly wrong. We lost four games, drew two and won two, losing 5-3. But it was my own game which has haunted me non-stop for 24 hours. I was winning easily and then made one indifferent move, not catastrophic but indifferent, and my already tense disposition became one of total panic. The combination of the stress of my game and worrying about the other lads combined to make me freeze and our chances of going up were clicking away with the rhythmical chimes of my clock. I lost my match on time, and that was it. Had I won, we would have drawn 4-4 and we would have been on an open-top bus riding through Hackney with the radio phone-ins dedicated entirely to our feat.

We were all crestfallen on the night. But watching the highlights of Manchester United on TV when I got home resonated loudly with me. To be a winner in sport - and for the purposes of this article, let's call chess a sport - an individual or team has to have nerves of steel and be totally focused on the job in hand. This may sound obvious, but it is much easier to talk the talk than walk the walk.

In the car on the way to the game we were laughing about what an easy touch West London were going to be; after all we had hammered them in the first league meeting earlier in the season. We were even talking about which pub we were going to celebrate our promotion in.

But what we, and indeed Manchester United, found out was that we have no-one to blame but ourselves. Sir Alex Ferguson can find a raft of excuses, the Premiership not helping English clubs in Europe, the absence of key defenders and the rest. But watching the highlights, it was clear that there was none of the famous Fergie passion and iron will, and our chess team was no different.

The four of us who lost should not have; earlier in the season we would have won, so why did we lose when it mattered? Why couldn't we drive our opponents into submission as the Aussie cricketers did with anyone and everyone in the World Cup or like Kaka and Co did with United, or like Roger Federer does?

Late into the night, while reflecting on 'that move', the answer came to me. In the pub, it was pointed out to me that I should have moved my King to the f2 square at the crucial point of the game but I hadn't looked hard enough at the position. I thought I was winning and everything would be fine. And in neglecting to be bothered about such minutiae, I crossed the line between success and failure in sport.

Before each cricket World Cup game, Matthew Hayden was hitting literally hundreds of balls served to him by a bowling machine all over Barbados; come the semi-final and he did the same to the South Africans. Hayden, like sports greats, does not take part to have a bit of a laugh or enjoy a lager at stumps, he takes part to win and only to win.

It's a long, long way in sports kilometres between an unimportant chess league match played in a council committee room with the thuds of the tango club permeating the walls dividing us, and the heights of the Champions League semi-final played before a packed San Siro. But Manchester United and Hackney 2 shared a common destiny that night; neither had that killer instinct and iron will to win. United have had it on many other nights, famously in Barcelona and at Villa Park in 1999. Hackney 2 had it at Hendon in February.

But sport isn't about past winners, it's about present and future success, and if anyone from Hackney Chess Club dares suggest at the forthcoming AGM that the Middlesex League Division Three team did well to make it to third place, I'll move his head to the f2 square.