Defeat is fine. Defeat is dealable-with. Defeat is all part of a day's work for a professional athlete. If you can't find a way of dealing with defeat, then you can't be a professional athlete, unless you happen to be Ed Moses*. Everyone else has to find a way of coping and moving on, in resignation or fury, according to temperament.

Humiliation is different. Humiliation is not something you bargained for. Perhaps that's the definition of humiliation: the kind of defeat that nobody can deal with. And it is exactly what Martin Johnson and the England rugby union team have been striving to cope with since they were beaten 42-6 by South Africa at Twickenham on Saturday.

It was a record number of points conceded at Twickenham and a record margin of defeat, but it isn't the numbers that matter, for all that Johnson couldn't let go of them after the match. “Forty-two six,” he said, again and again, in horrified wonder.

But it wasn't the points, it was the nature of the defeat; the way that, in attack after attack, England went backward. At every five-metre scrum, the wave broke and rolled back, England staggering in the wrong direction, ball in hand; back, running out of ideas, belief, trust, identity.

There was nothing that England could do. Piece by piece they were dismantled, player by player they were unmanned. How can they ever recover? How can Danny Cipriani, the fly half, ever believe in his own powers again, as his spirit was broken before our eyes? How can Johnson, the fledgeling team manager, ever convince himself that he has what it takes to lead England to triumph?

Again and again, as you look through the history of sport, you find teams who have met defeat and then risen to triumph. But when you find a team who have been genuinely humiliated, you find no such thing. Humiliation can only ever be followed by revolution, or by a long period of hurt and denial and a lot of people using the world “cyclical”.

But humiliation is not part of a cycle. It is a full stop, a dead end. If you try to continue in the same way after a humiliation, refusing to panic, believing in decisions already made, you will never recover. This is the nature of humiliation.

Those of us who are not professional athletes still know about humiliation. We have all experienced humiliations in our own lives and we know that worse than the pain is the feeling of helplessness, of being unmanned. But it's worse for professional athletes. They suffer their humiliations in public.

We all saw Cipriani falling apart. We saw his eyes glaze over, we saw fear replace confidence. We all saw, throughout the team, a group of men whose essential nature was being denied. And how do you deal with that?

Let us turn to other humiliations in other team sports and look for lessons. We can, alas, do that comfortably enough by sticking with teams called England.

The England football team were humiliated in the qualifying competition for the last European Championship. They didn't suffer the same single traumatic defeat, rather it was a rising tide of impotence culminating in one deeply humiliating night of failure. It was a slow death, with defeats in Croatia and Russia, unacceptable draws against the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Israel and that awful goalless first half against Andorra, during which the crowd turned on the team and their hapless head coach, Steve McClaren.

It ended, with dreadful inevitability, in that rain-washed, tear-drenched night at Wembley, where England needed a draw against Croatia and promptly fell two goals behind. Heroically, they drew level - and then conceded one more. It was a deeply destructive experience. True, the individuals could go back to their clubs and seek another glory, but the England football team as a corporate entity was destroyed.

Football went for its tried and trusted response to humiliation: sack the manager, bring in a big name, throw a double-six and start again. It helps that with a national side you can make a new team right away, without buying and selling. And it has worked. Under Fabio Capello, England have been relaunched and the team is nine tenths of the way towards qualification for the

World Cup. Sacking the boss works, at least in the short term. That's why football people are so crazy about sacking. It is certainly the most effective instant solution to the problem of humiliation: go to Tottenham Hotspur, go to Newcastle United to see more.

The England cricket team can offer a fresh take on humiliation. They were on the way to a 7-0 defeat in the one-day series against India before the last two matches were cancelled yesterday. But this is not a new thing - it is part of the great arc of humiliation that has been part of England cricket since the winter of 2006-2007. England still haven't recovered. That's what real humiliation can do.

It began in a manner only cricket could conjure up, with England triumphant, scoring 551 for six declared against Australia in the second Test in Adelaide. Paul Collingwood made a double hundred and Kevin Pietersen, in scoring 158, made Shane Warne look like a busted flush, the great leg spinner finishing with first-innings figures of one for 167. But Australia - partly thanks to Warne - turned the match around. England collapsed horrifyingly in the second innings and went on to lose the Ashes 5-0.

England's response was to do nothing. It was cyclical. They were too gentlemanly to sack the manager or the captain. And so England went to the World Cup in the Caribbean and inevitably, they were humiliated again. They lost to every side of note they came across, beating only Canada, Kenya, Ireland, Bangladesh and West Indies.

Duncan Fletcher, the head coach, was eased out, but the new start never materialised. Under yet another captain, this time Pietersen, England began another new start late last summer. They beat South Africa in a (dead) Test and then in four one-dayers, but it was not to last. They are battling against a humiliation once again.

England have not recovered from that car-crash of a match in Adelaide. Since then, at Test level, they have beaten only New Zealand and West Indies, losing to Australia, India, Sri Lanka and South Africa - and this is the side, remember, who were supposed to the best in the world by now.

Humiliation is not a routine event and cannot be dealt with by routine means. Humiliation is not something you can budget for, not something you can take in your stride. When it happens, it lays waste to everything around it. And for the England rugby team, the option of sacking the team manager is unavailable: this is the new manager, this is the new start, this is the brave new world that was supposed to take us away from the waywardness and inconsistency that England have suffered since they won the World Cup five years ago.

Johnson, sent in to rebuild the England team, now has to rebuild his rebuilding programme - and because this is not defeat but humiliation, he has a stupendously difficult task. All he can do is look for progress. Against the All Blacks tomorrow, that will be a hard task. A manageable defeat, then, a performance that looks coherent, a side who look more than quarter-baked, a side who are outplayed but not out-thought, outfought or out-cooled.

It begins with honesty, and that is Johnson's long suit; perhaps his only suit at this stage in his coaching career. England's immediate future depends on Johnson's reaction to his own humiliation.

*Between 1977 and 1987, Moses ran 122 races at 400 metres hurdles without defeat.