The England cricket team are in the position of a person who charges back into a burning house to rescue the baby and comes out with the cat. It’s a nice cat, and you are fond of it, but it’s not exactly what you went in for. Still, there’s not much you can do except stroke it.

No England cricketer will leave Australia with pride. But at least this fabulous run of two victories in as many matches gives them back the feeling that they are real sportsmen, the knowledge that good things can happen as well as bad.

By one of those amazing coincidences, the England rugby union team also won a match the other day. And of course, the great joy of the victory came from the fact that England had been having such a dreadful run of it, touching rock-bottom in the autumn.

And Lord, if the England football team can beat Spain in the friendly at Old Trafford tonight, then there will be no hiding from the nation’s sporting optimism. But it doesn’t seem more than a couple of weeks ago that television and radio stations were asking me to come on and explain why England is a nation of losers. That’s because it wasn’t more than a couple of weeks ago.

If the football boys win tonight, no doubt I’ll be fielding more calls: why is England a nation of winners? If so, I’ll tell them that the last question is no more sensible than the first.

England is a sporting nation, and it fights its sporting battles on many fronts. It stands to reason that England will lose a few matches, and also win a few matches. That’s the truth of it, but truth isn’t a very exciting way of looking at things. The cricket team lost the Ashes, the rugby union team lost eight matches out of nine, the football team are struggling to qualify for the 2008 European Championship and suffered a 2-0 defeat by Croatia in October. Why are we such a nation of losers?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I suppose England failed to produce Steve Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent, Kelly Holmes, Andrew Flintoff, Bobby Charlton and Jonny Wilkinson. Athletes who have 11 Olympic gold medals, an Ashes victory and two World Cups between them.

But this nation-of-losers stuff is extraordinarily attractive to the national psyche. We are not a nation of losers, but we love to think that we are. Perhaps it’s like believing you won’t get any presents for Christmas, because it’s always such a lovely surprise when you do.

The fact is that all nations are nations of losers: in every tournament, there are more losers than winners. Bad streaks are inevitable. Good streaks are inevitable, too, but not in a passive, fatalistic way, like waiting for the 49 bus. They come from strong, often insanely dedicated people — performers, coaches, selectors and administrators; and every now and then, everything comes together.

England had the most dismal record in Test match cricket for ten years, but even that turned around when Nasser Hussain and Duncan Fletcher took over, and it set England on the way to winning the Ashes. It didn’t happen because a turnaround was inevitable, it happened because, in the end, it was perhaps inevitable that exceptional people would come along.

The truly surprising thing, so far as the cricketers are concerned, is that it took so long for a team full of good players to start winning on this present tour to Australia. The run of failure shows not the team’s feebleness, but the depth of that extraordinary sporting disaster in Adelaide, in the second Test, when England lost from a position in which defeat was impossible. It is only now that the key players, those who were part of both Adelaide and the present one-day victories, have at last begun to recover.

One of the rum things about human life is that we treat any stage we happen to be going though as something permanent and unchangeable, as if spring will never come, as if happiness will never end, as if youth will last for ever. Then we turn to sport, one of the most volatile and changeable of all human activities, and still we assume that every period is permanent, that we are a nation of losers, or, on rarer occasions, that we are destined to be conquerors of the world for ever. Life is not like that, sport even less.

But perhaps this is one of the secrets of sport’s eternal fascination: that we get stuck in the rut of victory, and are taken down sharply, thrillingly, stimulatingly by defeat; or we get stuck in the rut of defeatism and victory comes — as it did at Twickenham on Saturday, as it did in Brisbane yesterday — as the most glorious and delightful surprise.