Whose was it?

His who is gone.

Who shall have it?

He who will come.

These lines from Sherlock Holmes - The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual, of course - came unexpectedly into my mind when reading about the latest return of Andrew Flintoff. He is in Abu Dhabi, hitting boundaries and taking wickets for Lancashire in a pre-season thrash. He is recovering from a fourth ankle operation and performing, we are told, at 70 per cent.

So English cricket will soon be all right again. Flintoff is back and so, in a year and a bit, England will have a chance in the Ashes. All will be well. The England team have not been much cop of late, but Freddie will make everything all right. You'll see.

In sport, we spend out lives looking for saviours, for messiahs, for someone who will make everything all right. This is not an inappropriate time to be talking about messiahs, but remember, Easter commemorates the fact that the Christian religion has had its Messiah for 2,000 years. Christianity is not about the search for another.

But sport is perpetually hunting for messiahs. Sport sometimes seems all about he who will come. Sport revels in the notion that soon someone will arrive and put things right. The England cricket team were labouring at the start of their tour to New Zealand, but be of good cheer because Flintoff will soon be back among us.

Newcastle United have been entertaining us all season with their messiah fixation. They brought in Kevin Keegan for nothing less than the holiness of his name. But it's not working out. Can it be much longer before they appoint Alan Shearer for the holiness of his? Shearer's coming, yes, Shearer will make everything all right.

The past two football World Cups have been about England teams waiting for the man who would make everything all right. They have all been about metatarsals and messiahs. In 2002 it was David Beckham, in 2006 Wayne Rooney. Both got metatarsalled before the tournament began. All the speculation was about whether or not they would play. Both did, although neither was fit. All the build-up, for spectators and players alike, was about looking into the future for a man who would perform sporting miracles at an unspecified time. We have, it seems, a profound need to believe in such things. I am not convinced that this helps us in sport or in life.

England's progress in 2002 took on a rather surreal air. This was a good team, but the mood was all about, ‘Well, if we are this good now, just see what we'll be like in four years' time'. The future is where our true meaning lies. Thus the meaning of the present was lost. England could have beaten Brazil in that quarter-final, you know. They were a goal up and looking a serious football team. But they were overcome, and one of the reasons was because they felt it didn't really matter. This wasn't the real thing, that would come in 2006. The team were living in the future; and that is why they made a hash of the present.

Four years later the campaign was undermined by the wait for Rooney. Every match was about whether he'd be back, how long he could play, how fit he was. In the end, Rooney fell apart and got himself sent off for goolie-stomping. Again, the weight of the future had overwhelmed the present.

Sport spends so much of its time wishing its life away and this is something we should resist for the sake of sport and for the sake of our souls. The England rugby union team's woeful performance in the RBS Six Nations Championship is considered acceptable because it is part of a long-term plan for the 2011 World Cup. The cricket team's present Test series and those that follow are about preparing for the Ashes summer of 2009.

After the World Cup of 2006, the England football team went in for a kind of reverse-messiah process. It was decided that all would be well as soon as Sven-Göran Eriksson was replaced as head coach. That brought us Steve McClaren: well, all would be right as soon as he was gone, then. Now we have Fabio Capello, with his second match in charge coming up next week. And it's all about the World Cup of 2010.

In the early 1990s, Arthur Smith and Chris England wrote a play set on the day of the England football team's World Cup semi-final against West Germany in Italia '90 called An Evening with Gary Lineker. It is about relationships going disastrously wrong as a match unravels. But then the stage lights up. No, England don't lose on penalties! England reach the final after all! Yes, and the relationships fix themselves and happiness and harmony are restored, for Lineker himself appears on stage, as deus ex machina, as messiah, and the whole world is transformed into the place it should be.

Except that it isn't, of course. The fantasy fades and the world is the same as it was before. The messes we make cannot be cleaned up by someone else, in sport or in marriage or anywhere else. There is no figure coming along in the near future to transform our existence.

This is a good day for penitential reading. C.S. Lewis said that living in the past is a good way of avoiding the problems and responsibilities of the present, but it isn't half as good as living in the future. And living in the future is the great vice of modern humankind. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis assumes the character of a tempter and assures us that the Devil's great plan is to have us all “hagridden by the future ... a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end”. And yet that's how we see sport; and how we run sport.

This team, this individual, can only get better. Things will fall in place, next week, next season, next World Cup. All of life, it seems, is a warm-up for something else, something that may never take place. But have no fear, because someone will come along soon and make everything all right.

Thus we destroy for ourselves the essential truth of sport. Sport is the most vividly present thing in public life. Sport takes place in the now. We want to watch it live, when we still don't know what will happen next. And yet even here we find it possible to live in the future, to live for the time when someone will make it all right.

Thus we blind ourselves to sport's truth, perhaps because that truth, when looked at closely, is so hard, so uncompromising, so uncomfortable to live with. Sport teaches us that the individual is responsible for his own actions and that the only time we can control is the present. Lineker will not come to make our lives all right, nor will Freddie or Beckham or Rooney or Capello. In sport, in life, the only time is now.