Time, I think, for a brief lesson on mimicry in the natural world. For it is my view that the England cricket team have adopted the wrong mimetic strategy and that is why we have a side of unpleasant, loud-mouthed, posturing young men repeatedly making titanic fools of themselves by their ill-judged and offensive behaviour.

Because they're not really like that. Deep down they are all good, serious professional athletes and in private they have at least some of the ironies intact. No doubt with all of them in real life the default mechanism is decent behaviour and good manners. But as soon as they get on to a cricket pitch, or behind a microphone, the mimicry cuts in.

The people they are trying to mimic are the Australians, of course. The Australians invented sledging, rudeness and overt aggression as a part of cricket. They are also the best in the world and have been for some time. So, England reason, they had better be rude and unpleasant, too - or they won't be the best in the world.

Well, James Joyce drank phenomenal quantities of white wine and therefore, by the same argument, the only way to write the Ulysses of the 21st century is by getting sozzled nightly on the drink Joyce called Archduchess's Urine.

The error is that England think that this form of mimicry makes them look like seriously hard cricketers. Actually, it makes them look like eejits.

What they are performing is Batesian mimicry; that is to say, the imitation of a dangerous species by one that is in fact harmless. The hover fly looks like a wasp, so it gets respect. It carries no sting, but it wears the black-and-yellow uniform of danger.

Now all this works perfectly well so long as the hover fly doesn't start trying to sting people. And that's what the England cricket team are doing - performing all their tedious repertoire of well 'ard antics and seeing them blow up in their faces. We had the jellybeans on the pitch last year, last week we had the collision between Ryan Sidebottom and Grant Elliott and the subsequent refusal of Paul Collingwood, the England captain, to withdraw the team's appeal for a run-out.

Collingwood the Englishman cut in later with his apologies, but Collingwood the pseudo-Aussie, Collingwood the mimic, Collingwood the hover fly, Collingwood the well 'ard England captain had done the damage. The fact is that such behaviour runs against the national character and the national tradition of playing sport and it consistently makes fools of the English cricketers who adopt it.

The traditional national strategy for English cricket is what scientists call aggressive mimicry - adopting the appearance of a harmless species while being in fact extremely dangerous. After you, old boy, and then the stiletto. Politeness self-deprecation, decent manners, diffidence, and then the destruction of the by now bemused opponent. Moral: poseurs cannot help but look like poseurs, no matter how hard they try.

Great rivalries have allure of love affairs

Tennis is the best sport in the calendar for rivalries. Great rivalries don't come often, which is also good; rarity matters. A great rivalry cannot help but cast its shadow over a tournament, so that the players outside the duopoly feel almost duty bound to step aside and let the two great ones continue their private business.

And so, with dreadful inevitability, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer seem to be on a collision course yet again. This year's Wimbledon final seems to be the match for which both have been waiting all their lives, their difference in nature, in physique, in costume, in style being nothing more than a preparation for the events of the coming Sunday.

It is hard to believe that it won't take place because they both seem to desire it so much. There is a sense of destiny about it; it would be almost impertinent for another player to spoil it. There is an unearthly intimacy about their relationship - the strange love that unites long-term rivals. This is so much the case that John McEnroe was bereft when Bjorn Borg made his desperate early retirement. It was an act of will that demeaned them both.

Borg, it seemed, could not cope with the almost claustrophobic intimacy of this rivalry any longer and he found the sporting life insupportable when he was no longer No1. Lord knows what will happen to Federer if he loses in the final-reel shoot-out, but it will be a defining occasion in the life of both him and Nadal. If it does, indeed, take place, it will be so intense, so vivid and so painful an occasion that I already feel almost squeamish about attending it. The only thing worse would be missing it.

As Federer continues his tilt at a sixth successive Wimbledon title, so everyone conjures with the name of Borg, who won five times, but fell short at the sixth. That was the summer of 1981. McEnroe met Borg in the final and the two of them created yet another masterpiece, with McEnroe winning in four sets.

And I wonder, was that the greatest summer of sport? That same too short few months gave us Botham's Ashes, in which England and Ian Botham performed a series of miracles to defeat Australia from a position of abject humiliation. It also gave us the greatest of Derbys, in the days when the Derby really was the Derby. It was won by Pegasus, who was masquerading under the name of Shergar. So, 1981 - the greatest sporting summer. Discuss.

Brad Gilbert unable to confront the truth

The seediest moment of Wimbledon so far was an interview on the BBC with Brad Gilbert, the coach hired by the Lawn Tennis Association at vast expense to lead Andy Murray to grand-slam glory. Murray parted company with Gilbert after a few tempestuous months and since then Gilbert has succeeded in coaching Alex Bogdanovich to a first-round exit at Wimbledon last week.

Gilbert's response to this double blow to his reputation as a coach of world-class standing was to give his interview behind a pair of shades so immense and so dark that it seemed that he must be suffering from an unsightly, possibly lethal optical condition. He explained that the entire problem came down to “a couple of writers”. That explains it, then. That's why Murray sacked him and that's why Bogdanovich lost - because one or two writers expressed reservations about his appointment. Makes sense to me.

Rowers shattered by pain of defeat

After the Boat Race I made some remarks in this space about the way that defeat is peculiarly painful in rowing. Apparently I'm not alone in thinking this. Henley Royal Regatta starts on Wednesday and the River and Rowing Museum in the Oxfordshire town is holding an exhibition of some tremendously vivid paintings by Chris Gollon that explore the idea of defeat on the water. All defeat is painful - that is what sport means. All glory is measured in the tears of the losers. But in rowing, complete exhaustion accompanies the realisation that you are not, in fact, good enough; body and spirit are simultaneously and devastatingly shattered. The poor rowers, exposed in front of us, generally huge men in tiny, ill-fitting boats, can do nothing but show the world their pain.