With the start of the European football championships in a few days without the presence of England, and the failure of any tennis players from the UK to make any credible attempt for glory at Wimbledon, are we heading for a miserable summer, and are we once and for all the undisputed dunces in Europe when it comes to sport?

The Beijing Olympics will also prove to be a disaster for the UK if eighth place is not achieved, which would be an improvement from 2004 when Team GB came tenth with 30 medals nine golds, nine silver, and 12 bronze.  Imagine we are aiming to come eighth!

What is fundamentally wrong with the Brits when it comes to sport?  For those who are actively involved in sports like tennis the problems are quite clear.  Access to facilities are difficult, coaching at the grass roots is either of a poor standard, non-existent or badly maintained by the respective federations.  Tennis is a particular bug-bear for the Brits when the summer arrives when you see the world rankings you see only 1 British male in the top 100 Andy Murray 12th, Jamie Baker 240th, Alex Bogdanovic 242th, Joshua Goodall 334th. In comparison to France with 14 men in the top 100, Germany 7 men in the top 100, 7 men from Russia in the top 100, 10 from Argentina and 7 men from the USA in the top 100.

Most schools in the state sector in London struggle to teach children the basics in education, to expect elite level training in sports like tennis is unrealistic.

Fundamentally there is something wrong with the approach to sport in the UK and London generally.  If you look at other capitals like Moscow, New York, Paris or Belgrade you will see children playing tennis for fun after school, and having good coaching at regular intervals.  We do not have enough enthusiastic parents or members of society coaching at the very grass roots, except in soccer, the alpha and the omega in this country when it comes to sport.  The resentment of winners in this country seems to be the prevalent sentiment in the UK, we love losing.  When if you compare Russia or the US when their teams under perform a feeling of "that’s not good enough" normally follows.  When the US basketball team got thumped at the FIBA World Championships in Tokyo in 2006 losing to Greece and coming third overall, the NBA undertook a postmortem to see why the US basketball game has not moved on in certain areas. European teams like Spain the current world champions, Greece second and France has advanced in defensive techniques which is crucial at elite basketball. 

In the UK we do not encourage the inner cities to be playing any other sports apart from soccer.  The success the UK has enjoyed in athletes was primarily down to the investment in sports ground like New River in Tottenham which encouraged young black Londoner's to participate high level sports, producing stars like Tony Jarrett the European Champion 110m hurdle jumper in 1999.

Maybe sport is no longer important here, and that we have too much wealth and not enough necessity to win, our tummies are full, "why should I get up at 5am and do four hours training before school?”  The hunger is not there, and we don't how to win without excess (remember the rugby or Ashes win) and we do not take the right lessons when we lose.