Sometimes in sport things just don’t make sense - Phil Vickery, England rugby union captain

For a start, it doesn’t make sense that I’m here in Paris. From my window I can see the Eiffel Tower, the ugliest city icon in the world, and even, rather closer, the still greater miracle of an occasional strike-busting Metro train. I expected to be beginning a few days’ leave at home in the Suffolk countryside instead of pondering on miracles, especially on the series of miracles that brought England to the rugby World Cup final.

Vickery is right. It really doesn’t make sense. Which is a problem, really, because it is a sportswriter’s job to make sense of such things, to penetrate what is impenetrable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. But I confess I am struggling.

How could a team who looked so terrible against the United States and who were hammered 36-0 by South Africa in the pool stage be in the World Cup final? How could they have strung together wins against Samoa, Tonga, Australia and France?

The New Zealanders can’t understand how they are out. Nor can the Aussies. Nor the French. But England can’t understand how they’re in. It is, as Vickery so candidly remarked, beyond sense. Sport does that. Not often, not regularly, but every now and then sport takes leave of its senses and gives us a result that simply can’t be explained, which leaves psychologists, conspiracy theorists, coaches, columnists and players scratching their heads and wondering what the bloody hell is going on.

The sheer senselessness of sport is a phenomenon that sometimes leads to incomprehensible victories, sometimes to equally incomprehensible defeats. But either way it is something precious. In some ways, perhaps, the possibility of senselessness lies at the heart of sport and its enduring appeal.

Some examples: at the Athens Olympics of 2004, Matthew Pinsent and the Great Britain coxless four were losing. They had given it everything and had failed to make up the ground on Canada. There were ten strokes left to row and with those ten strokes they won. It was as if they dematerialised and reappeared again an instant later, half a dozen feet farther on. I was there and I still don’t believe. Pinsent was doing it and I don’t think he believes it either.

I was there for the Miracle of Istanbul and I don’t believe that either. It doesn’t make sense that Liverpool could win from 3-0 down against AC Milan in the Champions League final. You can talk all you like – and I have – about the force of personality of Pinsent, of Steven Gerrard, but these things still don’t make sense. That night in Istanbul, that morning in Athens, sporting logic was destroyed.

Another incomprehensible occasion: Goran Ivanisevic’s victory at Wimbledon in 2001, when he entered as a wild card. It was the tournament of the three Gorans, with his defeat of Tim Henman over three days, the repeated double-faults on match point, the final impossible point.

Yet another: Kevin Pietersen’s frenzied assault on Brett Lee on the last day of the Ashes series of 2005 - something that, obviously, shouldn’t have worked.

And how come Fujiyama Crest won that seventh race at Ascot that day in 1996? Frankie Dettori had won the previous six races; he won the seventh because sense and logic had gone out of the window. In a similar way, Mark Todd won Badminton in 1994 on Horton Point, a horse he first sat on the day before the start. The whole point of this sport is to test the long-term relationship between horse and rider.

Defeats can be equally incomprehensible. The form of the England rugby team in the four years since they became world champions is in this category – a matter forever elusive of explanation. The England football team’s record in penalty shoot-outs is much the same – five defeats, one victory.

West Indies’ defeat by India in the cricket World Cup final of 1983 makes no sense either. No matter how much you talk about hubris, the fact is that 183 was not a defendable total on that wicket, not with the West Indies batsmen and the India bowlers. But it happened and cricket changed for ever as a result.

Liverpool’s defeat by Wimbledon in the 1988 FA Cup Final went against logic, too. Before the match, top pundits were hoping the match would not be too embarrassing, no more than four or five-nil to Liverpool.

The most astonishingly incomprehensible defeat I have witnessed came when England scored 531 for six declared in Adelaide against Australia 12 months ago and lost. But the type specimen of the incomprehensible defeat came in 1956, when Devon Loch, triumphantly clear in the Grand National, ridden by Dick Francis, collapsed before the finish. A few minutes later he got up and trotted back to his box, leaving a jockey heartbroken. The jockey-heroes of Dick Francis thrillers win the Gold Cup as a matter of course, but they never, ever win the Grand National.

Now all these senseless victories and senseless defeats are a problem for those who must see sense in the world, who must find some kind of logic in sport. But for those who are less troubled by the need for explanation, there is a great glory and wonder in all this. The escape, from logic, from common sense, from earthly laws, is the most extraordinary liberation.

In defeat, these things are dismaying; chastening beyond all proportion. I remember the devastation among the England cricket supporters in Adelaide, the blank dejection after the penalty shoot-out against Portugal in the European Championship quarter-finals of 2004. Both occasions felt, ludicrously, like the end of the world and it is the lack of logic that makes it so dismaying. It all seemed so horribly unfair, mainly because it was. But in victory – in an unfair and illogical victory – well, that is something else altogether.

Then, it is as if we had escaped the sense of gravity, in the same way that Arthur Dent, in the fourth part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, steps out of the window with a girl named Fenchurch and flies. Those rare moments, when the human spirit takes leave of its senses and soars, are something we have all experienced, but rarely, rarely.

Love can do this, the greatest of all music can takes us back there and, bizarrely enough, sport can do it as well. Anything is possible. The most delirious happiness in the world seems to offer itself to you, the spectator, on easy terms, the more remarkable because it is so unexpected, so utterly impossible. Of course, sport will seldom offer something that will change your life, define the way face the world, change your understanding of the way things are.

But it seems to. It seems to offer, in these utterly senseless victories, the same perfect ecstasies of the happiest times you have known, times when everything in the world was possible, times when you, too, floated above the earth with your beloved in your arms.

With sport, the moment fades, alas, too fast, although the glow remains; sweet memory of the time when the world took leave of its senses, you were the beneficiary and it seemed that the entire world had arranged itself for no other purpose than your own happiness.