Whilst watching the England cricket and rugby teams YET AGAIN bouncing between top form and utter disaster, I was struck by an interesting theory. Generally speaking, in between bouts of sudden glory, the English sports teams tend to do one thing spectacularly well-let everybody down. We get all built up with feelings like ‘this is Henman’s year!’ ‘it’s England’s turn to win, we’ve got Rooney!’ and then boom. Rooney can’t be bothered and Henman goes out in the quarter finals AGAIN. We lose.

So I think, for our own sanity in some cases, that what the English seem to or perhaps have to thrive on is losing.

However, before you tirade at me for this sweeping generalisation, I would like a chance to explain myself.

Let’s look, for example, at the current situation with the Cricket World Cup. England, hot from winning the Ashes, should be all buoyed up and ready to slaughter the Netherlands. For some reason, winning easily does not seem to compute for the English side. They would much prefer to literally throw it away as if to make it more challenging for them! In all the matches so far, they have either been chasing after an appalling fielding effort or desperately trying to prevent after a poor batting leg. And don’t get me wrong, this has made the matches almost unbearably exciting and when we have won after these frantic chases, everyone has been extremely happy (and slightly emotionally drained!) So could it be that, on some level, the English need failure to make success all the sweeter?

Each time that England lose, at football or at tennis or at rugby (I don’t even need to mention Ireland do I?) generally speaking, we pick ourselves up fairly quickly and start hoping for our next chance! Is this true in all aspects of ‘English-ness’? In business, if we fail to make a deal or if we don’t quite get the price we want, do we take it as a personal challenge and strive to do better? And then win a better client or work all the harder and reap more benefits from it?

Of course, what happens more often than not in sport is that we get too into failing and then we actually do lose and nobody is happy. But perhaps in recruitment terms, using failure as a springboard to try strive to do better spurs us on to greater achievements and is the way to help you get that better candidate.