NOW I'm beginning to understand the need for all those flags. Just over a week ago thousands of them were fluttering proudly; now only a defiant handful remain as the country is enveloped in gloom.

It is one of the mysteries of our age that as a nation we barely speak to our neighbours yet we have a need for the sort of bonding which flag-flying represents. It has nothing to do with rabid patriotism, nor even much to do with the obsession with football. It's all about being one of the lads.

Well that's the conclusion my amateur psychology has led me to, and if I'm right it's high time for a national campaign to encourage people to become one of the lads by playing team sports instead of scandalously wasting time by lounging on the couch listening to pointless pundits like Ian Wright.

He's the worst example of a slob with nothing to say being turned into a celebrity, but there are plenty of others almost as bad, and the more they proliferate the more we get sucked into listening to their gibberish instead of getting off our backsides and doing something.

In the space of a week we've gone from ecstasy to agony. England were going to win Euro 2004, Henman was going to win Wimbledon and our cricket team were sweeping all before them. Or was it all just media hype?

Surely anyone with an ounce of realism must have known there was no logical reason for such optimism. Henman, as ever, has done his best but will never be better than a Wimbledon semi-finalist and the quarter-final was as far as we could realistically expect our footballers to progress. Perhaps they were robbed, but in truth they simply aren't good enough to go any further in a major competition.

The other glaring truth is that as a nation we don't deserve any better. If we truly want teams and sporting individuals who give us a reason for collective celebration and flag flying we have to act instead of endlessly analysing our failures.

It has to start with parents and primary schools, and let's get rid of the ridiculous notion that competition is bad for youngsters. Let's also discourage the compensation culture which encourages parents to sue if their child fractures an eyelid. Mollycoddled kids will not produce a nation of winners.

TO TAKE the recent failures individually, I will first gloss over the football. David Beckham has been a better captain than I expected, but his continuation in the role is still a sad reflection on our inability to produce leaders. He obviously realised the penalty spot was in shocking condition and should have insisted either that something was done about it or that he be allowed to take his kick from at least a foot to the left.

His kick was the worst I have seen since Don Fox famously missed what would have been the winning conversion in a Rugby League Cup final 40 years ago, but it simply alerted the Portuguese to the problem. Any leader worth his salt would have stood his ground, and as his performances were moderate it's obviously time for a new captain. Does anyone spring to mind?

BECKHAM taking the first penalty perhaps displayed the same sort of gung-ho approach which cricket captain Michael Vaughan has adopted in trying to open England's one-day innings with a blaze of strokes.

Forty years of one-day experience have taught county sides that when batting first it is necessary for the openers to make an assessment of what is a realistic total in the conditions.

This simple truth has been clouded by the Aussies always blasting away from the outset. But if they lose early wickets they always find somebody down the order to bale them out. We aren't so fortunate and Vaughan's failure to realise that meant the 12,000 capacity crowd at Riverside on Tuesday were badly short-changed.

So were the people who put in all the hard work to ensure that international cricket continues to come to the North-East.

It needed somebody like Graham Thorpe to settle things down in the middle order, and sadly Durham's Paul Collingwood is struggling to fulfil that role. With 49 one-day international caps he is considered experienced enough to adapt to situations, but the fact is that he is not in very good form because he doesn't play enough cricket. He remains on the fringe of the Test squad and spends too much time sitting around waiting for one-day internationals.

TIGER Tim will be 30 in September and hard as he tries he is never going to have the armoury to stay ahead of the young bucks coming up behind him. He was probably doomed on Wednesday from the moment that the Radio Five Live commentators announced that Mario Ancic had a poor record in tie breaks. The Croat promptly won one to take the first set and never looked back.