"The mere sight of my pussy drives him mad."
Mrs Slocombe, Are You Being Served

There is a phenomenon that money-men call the Dead Cat Bounce. The term is used when the price of a share falls calamitously, disastrously, terminally – and then, for some unfathomable reason, rises again. Not very much, and not for very long, but it bounces.

The trick is not to view this as a recovery but as one of those routinely strange things that happen with men and money. Only the naive see a Dead Cat Bounce as a positive sign. In truth, things have gone too far, but this illusion of recovery is a regular occurrence and so it requires a name.

Now, sport is a vastly more elusive subject than money, which is why there are more stockbrokers than professional gamblers. And it can happen that an individual, but more often a team, will plummet to a point beyond which recovery is possible, and then bounce.

But not necessarily like a dead cat. Sometimes the bounce will take place with all the liveliness of Korky the Kat, Tobermory, Mog, Fritz the Cat, The Cat That Walked By Himself and Mrs Slocombe’s pussy. It has happened with all three of England’s principal ball-playing teams: rugby union, football and one-day cricket.

Let us go first to the point at which cat hit ground, the moment when disaster seemed complete, the moment of despair. With the rugby union team this happened a scant month ago, when, in the pool stage of the World Cup, England were beaten 36-0 by South Africa. It was one of the great sporting humiliations. England were hopeless. I don’t use the word to mean merely bad, I mean that England played without hope of winning, without hope of getting any better. They resembled a team who would have been happy to have done anything rather than play rugby football in front of a crowd of thousands.

They were embarrassed by their own ineptitude and were perhaps the worst world champions to attempt a defence of any title. It seemed possible, even probable, that they would fail to qualify for the knockout stages of the tournament. They were ripe for the plucking.

The England football team hit the ground in March, when they were held 0-0 at half-time by Andorra in the European Championship qualifying match and left the field to a chorus of loathing. This followed goalless draws against the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Israel and defeat in Croatia.

The team looked almost as hopeless as the rugby union boys, who were at least playing decent opposition. Steve McClaren, the head coach, looked as if he had been sandbagged. The gap between expectation and reality, familiar to all followers of the England football team, had never seemed wider.

Round about the same time, the England cricket team played in the World Cup and were the most dismal aspect of a dismal competition. England hit the floor against South Africa and the fact that they were beaten by nine wickets only hints at the scale of the defeat.

England made 154 runs. No one got a fifty. South Africa knocked them off in 19.2 overs. This was a team who didn’t have a clue about 50-over cricket. They looked a doomed side going through the motions; it seemed unlikely that the team would ever make a fist of this form of cricket.

And then – bounce! Each of the three teams hit the bottom and bounced. Not the hopelessness of the true Dead Cat Bounce, but as something miraculous. The England cricketers fought out a thrilling one-day series with India in the summer, running out 4-3 winners with a succession of canny, confident and resourceful performances.

And this week they took an unassailable lead in the one-day series in Sri Lanka, the first time they have won a one-day series on the sub-continent for 20 years. They did so with only three of the XI who won the Ashes so gloriously two years ago and of these three, Ian Bell was an underperforming mere passenger and Paul Collingwood got only one game. It has been an astonishing reversal.

The football boys returned from that dreadful half-time to set up a series of 3-0 wins, finishing the job against Andorra and then beating Estonia, Israel and Russia. They looked creative, comfortable, self-certain; even McClaren looked as if he knew what he was doing.

Meanwhile, the rugby union team scraped through to the quarter-finals with improved but still fumbling performances and met Australia. And it was simply astonishing. The team were unrecognisable. Suddenly there was appetite for the game, lust for the ball, trust in each other; all at once there was an urgent need to win, rather than a desire to escape too much of the blame.

Each of these three transformations is remarkable. You can find plenty of reasons for it, but none that explains the top-to-bottom change in the entire team.

With the cricketers, you can point to James Anderson’s wholehearted acceptance of his role as England’s No 1 bowler, the remaking of Ryan Sidebottom from one-cap wonder to an integral part of the side, the emergence of the long-heralded Stuart Broad.

But that doesn’t explain why batsmen who have been behind the pace are suddenly setting it.

With the football team you can talk about the renaissance of Michael Owen, with four goals in three qualifying matches. You can also talk about Steven Gerrard, at last boss of midfield, whose two goals, scored by thunderous force of will, eventually did for Andorra. But that doesn’t explain the way the disparate parts of the team started functioning as a unit, nor where this self-belief suddenly came from.

And with the rugby union team you are left simply staggered. There seems no logical explanation. The individual form of Andy Gomarsall and Andrew Sheridan were crucial and perhaps Brian Ashton, the head coach, had stumbled on the right mix of players at last. But it didn’t seem like a change of personnel, more like a spiritual transformation. And how do you begin to explain that?

It is something to do with the deepest meanings of sport. Sport depends on what is undependable – that is to say, the shifting sands of human nature, each player on his own, each team with an ever-changing dynamic.

It is something that is forever beyond control, forever elusive of definition and, as gamblers and pundits will tell you, prediction. It’s not that we don’t know what happens next, it’s that we can never know. The rugby union team may win the World Cup, they may be knocked out by France tomorrow. The football team may win the European Championship finals or lose to Estonia and Russia in the coming week. The one-day cricket team may come a cropper in New Zealand in the new year.

But all three of these teams have shown that in sport, recovery from a disastrous position is not only possible but is an ineluctable aspect of sport’s routine. The miracle is merely the staple of sport. In sports, dead cats don’t always bounce; quite frequently they leap.