There's defeat, and it happens, and it's part of the routine of an athlete's life. It's something you learn about, something you establish a way of dealing with. Methods include hard analysis, self-deception, mighty resolution, finding a scapegoat, hating the manager, sulking, kicking the cat: chacun à son goût.

But what about rout? Rout is quite different to defeat. In a rout, you don't just lose, you are overwhelmed. You can't think straight, you become complicit in your own downfall.

Rout is what happened to Arsenal when they lost 4-0 to Manchester United in the FA Cup at Old Trafford at the weekend. How do you recover from that?

Well, sometimes a rout is the best thing that can happen. Failure can no longer be disguised; inadequacy is unavoidable. Rout can be a self-defining - or a team-defining - experience. That was the case with the England rugby union team at last year's World Cup: they recovered from a 36-0 hammering by South Africa in the pool stage to reach the final.

The England cricket team suffered a rout against New Zealand as recently as last week. They followed a poor batting display with a witless display in the field and paid the penalty, losing by ten wickets. It was time for some serious thinking. Just three days later, England won the next match in the one-day series.

The problem with the Arsenal rout was that they were complicit from the start. Because it was “just” the FA Cup and they have a Champions League fixture against AC Milan in midweek, they went out prepared to sacrifice the match. With their injury problems and the financial question, such a view is at least understandable.

But I remember Steve Davis talking about hustlers in snooker. “Anyone can do it,” he said. “But the balls don't forgive you.”

This was a slightly mystical flight for the erstwhile Ginger Magician, but at base it means that if you take liberties with a game, it will affect the way you think about the game and therefore about the way you play it. If you play to lose on one or more occasion, you may later find it hard to adjust your mentality and find the hardness necessary to win.

Arsenal went prepared to lose and as a result, they suffered a rout. Now they have to transform themselves into a crack, winning team again. Is it really possible to do this at the flick of a switch? As Arsenal are still chasing two trophies, the Barclays Premier League and the Champions League, will the balls forgive them? And will they do so as early as Wednesday?

Smith proves Ashes victory is nothing but ancient history

In this newspaper, we will shortly be serialising the new book from Ed Smith, batsman for England (three times), captain of Middlesex and occasional Times writer. It is perkily entitled What Sport Tells Us About Life. Don't miss it. Smith is the most thoughtful athlete practising at present and his mix of wide reading, deep reflection and hard-won experience has created a book that everyone with a serious interest in sport needs to read.

I am particularly taken with the chapter on history. Smith is a historian and history is a taboo in sporting circles. History means that you are an in-my-dayer, or that you are harking back fruitlessly to past glories, or even more uselessly back to past defeats. Smith is passionately committed to the idea of history as a way of understanding the present and shaping the future.

In a virtuoso passage, he writes the history of England's 2005 Ashes victory from the points of view, in rapid succession, of a Whig historian such as Gibbon, an institutional historian, Carlyle and a counter-factual historian. As such, he writes that 1, England won the Ashes because of the majestic sweep of great events in which the class-bound nature of England changed for ever; 2, that it all came down to central contracts, Lord MacLaurin of Knebworth and Rodney Marsh's academy; 3, that history is but the biography of great men and that 2005 is the tale of Andrew Flintoff, and 4, what would have happened if Glenn McGrath hadn't got injured?

And so, even as English cricket is still looking to recover after the Ashes debacle in the series that followed, Smith remarks: “Most arguments in sport and history are not about what happened but about what matters.”

Briton riding high after show of pedal power

There are few things more cheering in life than a wonderful achievement from a 24-carat British nutter. Congratulations, then, to Mark Beaumont, who has just finished cycling round the world. He rode into Paris this week after covering more than 18,000 miles in 195 days, knocking a couple of months off the world record.

He would have gone faster, he said, if he could have found anything better than junk food in Australia and the United States. He travelled across Iran, and along the Afghan-Pakistan border, but inevitably had his worst time in the United States, at the hands of an old lady. She knocked him off his bike when cruising through a red light. As a result, Beaumont spent the night in a hostel, which, he discovered, doubled as a crack den. He lost his wallet and his camera.

But he made it in triumph and as I am sure you are already itching to do better, here is the route. Paris to Istanbul 2,054 miles; Istanbul to Calcutta 5,234 miles; Bangkok to Singapore 1,253 miles; Perth to Brisbane 4,085 miles; Dunedin to Auckland 907 miles; San Francisco to St Augustine, Florida, 3779.5 miles; Lisbon to Paris, 1,180 miles. Total: 18,492 miles.

Nabokov: great writer, useless as a goalkeeper

The thrilling stuff in The Times last week about the unburnt manuscript of Vladimir Nabokov has a particular resonance for all members of the goalkeeping union. Here is Nabokov on keeping goal for his college at Cambridge: “As with folded arms I leant back against the left goalpost, I enjoyed the luxury of closing my eyes, and thus I would listen to my heart knocking and feel the blind drizzle on my face and hear, in the distance, the broken sounds of the game, and think of myself as of a fabulous exotic being in an English footballer's disguise, composing my verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew. Small wonder I was not very popular with my team-mates.”