Allow me to suggest something a little unconventional: the England team who defeated France on Saturday night was no more courageous, heroic, gallant, gutsy, spirited or patriotic than the team who were humiliated by South Africa a month ago. They played considerably better rugby, to be sure, but why should that merit the miasma of abstract nouns in newspapers and on airwaves yesterday?

Is it any wonder that most of Britain’s sportsmen are so confused when a good performance is equated with valour and a bad day at the office with cowardice?

To say that a team are in form or out of form is one thing. But why do we have to resort to the language of moral acclamation and condemnation?

Heroes one week, cowards the next. Craven one week, valiant the next. It is as if we suppose that the moral fabric of the nation’s sportsmen and women gets a makeover on alternate Saturdays. Either we tone down the language or we are going to end up with athletes who suppose they are the victims of multiple personality disorder.

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BACKGROUND

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• Hipkiss bid to force Ashton’s hand falls short

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• Resurgent Gomarsall sets his sights on summit

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• France exceed all expectations as hosts

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• Robinson calls for 'one last push'

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Sport is neither a moral nor a philosophical undertaking but an athletic and a psychological one. I used to play quite a lot of sport and, for most of the time, it was rather like having a job. So I ask you: if the chap in graphics started producing snazzier visuals, would you drop him an e-mail saluting his heroism? If his work started to drop off, would you question his human worth?

The overreaction to the match on Saturday was perhaps best exemplified by some of the excitable souls who seemed to imagine that the Stade de France had played host to Trafalgar, Waterloo and the Somme all rolled into one. This was the language of sport fused with the poetry of war. Perhaps it is rugby, more than other sports, which inspires this kind of grating lyricism but one seems to remember similar stuff during the latest football World Cup.

But all of this raises a rather obvious question: if the renaissance of English rugby union cannot be attributed to “courage” or “heroism” or any of the other qualities that, in the ordinary run of things, do not get turned on and off like a tap, what should it be attributed to? It is here that we ought to shrug our shoulders, look to the skies and emit a mystical sigh. As Albert Camus, philosopher and former goalkeeper, said in another context: “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Some things just cannot be explained.

The irony, of course, is that the players are as mystified by the turnaround in their fortunes as everyone else. A glance at some of their newspaper columns yesterday was like a dissertation on the emergence of superstition. “There was, of course, Kenny Rogers blaring away with his song The Gambler in the dressing-room afterwards,” Mike Catt wrote. “It’s been well documented how that has been a feature of our campaign and he’s become our lucky charm. So that was straight on as soon as we arrived back in.”

This is not exactly unusual. Most sportsmen are so perplexed by the vagaries of “form” that they get into all sorts of bizarre routines. I won a big match as a teenager with the right sleeve on my shirt cut off because it did not have the logo of the team’s new sponsor and for the rest of my career travelled the world with a pair of scissors so that I could sever material below the right shoulder. And I like to think of myself as a rationalist.

Sport is enthralling precisely because it is elusive and superstition is rife precisely because of the kind of transformation that has overcome the England rugby union team in recent weeks. Brian Ashton and his men will continue to put their faith in the rituals and foibles that have served them over recent weeks and which have had nothing whatsoever to do with their run of form.

They will listen to Kenny Rogers and take comfort. But let us not say that they lacked heroism when they lost to South Africa. That is an insult to the men, the same men, we applauded on Saturday night.