It’s not that we’ve run out of money. Rather, we’ve run out of confidence. That’s the one semi-comprehensible fact that emerges from the specialist writing about the current financial supernova. Everyone says the same thing: the problem is panic, the problem is lack of belief.

The implication is obvious: if we all believed that there was money, there would be money. If we all had confidence, the problem would no longer exist. The solution, then, is psychological. We don’t need money: we need belief. But how do we build belief? How do we create confidence where none exists?

At once it becomes clear that this is not a question of higher mathematics but of lowest common denominators. Or to put that another way, sport. Sport deals daily with the problem of confidence. The currency of sport is ability: but the fortunes of able, indeed brilliant, athletes ebb and flow with the tides because of the question of confidence.

Take the England football team; take the England cricket team; take the England rugby team. The footballers failed to qualify for the European Championships held this summer. The England team were full of good players who had no belief in themselves as a corporate entity. Last month they went to Zagreb to play their nemesis, Croatia - and won 4-1. Suddenly, we have a team of world-beaters. That’s because there is a new coach, Fabio Capello, and the players believe in him.

Last summer the cricketers lost a Test series to South Africa. It was a humiliation. Then they won the last Test and reeled off four successive one-day matches against the same opponents, and looked unbeatable. They seemed different men. The reason? Kevin Pietersen had come in as captain. It’s not that Michael Vaughan, the previous captain, was no good. It’s that no one believed in him any more, himself included.

Meanwhile, the England rugby players, hag-ridden by devastating inconsistencies, are moving towards the autumn internationals with a spring in their step because Martin Johnson, the great on-pitch leader of the 2003 World Cup, has taken over as head coach.

A new leader. It’s the textbook solution. New leaders have, by definition, never failed; therefore, people believe in them, at least for a while. When their time is done their stock plummets and they leave. So it goes. In any crisis of faith you need a great leader, a person who will cause all around to suspend their disbelief, to regain that elusive yet unmistakable thing called confidence. It’s not reality that counts: it’s what we all believe is real.

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