This has been a tough week for Times columnists. First Jonny, then Hoggy. Who's next? Is none of us safe? Jonny Wilkinson has been dropped from the England rugby union team and Matthew Hoggard has been left out of the England cricket team. Both are required to carry the can for the failures of their team.

In both cases, defeat - humiliation is not too strong a word - has come at the hands of opponents whose abilities have been drastically underestimated. Victory should have been straightforward, but in the making of that justified assumption, the England teams were foredoomed to failure.

Victory should have been straightforward because these teams have a track record of excellence. Brilliance is not too big a word. Both have won remarkable victories in the recent past; both have subsequently embraced humiliation.

God defend us, then, from great victories. What we have here is a pattern of teams unable to come to terms with great achievement. The experience of being top of the world has led, again and again and with dismaying suddenness, to mediocrity and worse.

Can England teams not reach a peak without falling off it? The climb is steep, but for England the falling away is still steeper. There is no chance of a prolonged stay on the sunlit plateaux of excellence. No sooner has excellence been attained than our boys are tobogganing down the slippery slopes of failure. Excellence, it seems, is not a sustainable position.

The cricket team won the Ashes in 2005 and it seemed that they could at last be counted among the best. An era of brilliance was opening up before us, one in which England and Australia vied for the top place in the world.

Instead, the decline began more or less at once and is still going on. England were beaten out of sight in Australia last winter, humiliated in the World Cup, changed coaches and now, in a bad winter, they have lost in Sri Lanka and were hammered in the first Test match in New Zealand.

The rugby team slowly and painfully established themselves as the dominant force in the world and won the World Cup of 2003 as favourites. Since then, failure has mostly followed failure. Instead of a calm self-certainty, England have brought us bewildering inconsistency.

In the World Cup last year, England lost 36-0 to South Africa in a pool match, as bad a result as they have suffered, and then magically - stunningly - reached the final, where they lost again to South Africa, but this time creditably. Baffling. Since then, humiliation has followed in the RBS Six Nations Championship, with an outstanding result against France to confuse the issue.

The cricket and the rugby teams have had changes of coaches, injuries to key personnel and retirements, but that sort of thing happens to all teams all the time. The Australia cricket team has just lost Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, two of the finest to play the game, but they're still doing all right.

The common thread is England's inability to cope with victory, the English inability to build on triumph. Triumphs send English sporting teams into freefall.

The pattern holds good in football. The national team have had comparative success in recent leading tournaments, with three successive quarter-final places. So Sven-Göran Eriksson, the head coach, was disposed of and the direct result was that England failed to qualify for the 2008 European Championship finals this summer. From the world's top eight down to a team outside the best 16 in Europe.

The trend continues at club level. Clubs teams are not specifically English, neither in management nor personnel, but sustained excellence is, likewise, beyond them.

Manchester United don't have a bad record in England. In 1999 they lifted the European Cup and a decade or so of sustained excellence in that field seemed inevitable. But since then, nothing. As Brian Clough said of Sir Alex Ferguson: “For all his horses, knighthood and championships, he hasn't got two of what I've got. And I don't mean balls.”

Why can't English sporting organisations maintain a level of excellence? A Celt or an Antipodean would suggest that the reason lies in arrogance, that the English think they have a right to the top spot, and so once an English team have got there, they don't feel that they have to make an effort to stay.

An English person would look for an explanation based on diffidence, suggest that we are embarrassed about being so nakedly, so unapologetically excellent.

But perhaps the solution does not lie in national stereotypes. There has been some sustained success for Great Britain teams in Olympic sporting arenas and that cannot be put down entirely to Celtic influence. In sailing, cycling and rowing there have been remarkable results and a pattern of sustained excellence. English people are capable of establishing a culture of excellence and achievement.

But it doesn't happen in the high-profile team sports. The England football team won the World Cup in 1966, as you may have heard. In 1970 the team were better but fell short. And then, in 1974 and 1978, England failed to qualify for the finals. Excellence had led, in a shockingly short space of time, to despair. It is a despair that has been tasted by the England teams in all three leading ball sports in recent months. Excellence is unsustainable. Success can lead only to tears and dismay. Victory is merely the longer of the two routes that leads to heartbreak.

It comes down to a simple truth: that finding excellence is the easy bit. Any team of great talent and high ambition, run by a coach of strength, knowledge and self-belief, can get to the top. It's once you have got there that the difficult bit begins.

English teams have no contingency plan for excellence, no strategy for dealing with the calamity of victory. The assumption is that victory will take care of itself, but the plain and obvious fact is that it doesn't. Clive Lloyd captained the fearsome West Indies cricket team of the 1980s by maintaining discipline, by eradicating inter-island rivalries and lovingly nurturing underdog chippiness, even as the world quailed before them.

But in England the tendency is to think that victory is job done, not the beginning of a longer and harder struggle. And then the English way dictates that once the decline from excellence has begun, players must play for themselves, to keep their places, to retain that 40-plus batting average or whatever. And so the decline accelerates.

But then, when the right player galvanises the team, when the right coach has the right playing staff, when everything comes together again, the climb begins again and eventually an England team reach the top of the mountain.

Right now, all three of the big teams are struggling at the bottom of the slope, but no doubt in a few years one of them will amaze us by reaching the summit. The joy-bells will ring, the heavens will rejoice - and already the decline will have begun and once more we will encounter the horrors of victory.