As many predicted, England has yet again lost the Ashes in Australia. But listen closely to the criticism of the defeat and a curious vocabulary emerges. The problem, we are told, was not simply misjudgement but recklessness; not failure but irresponsibility. England did not merely lose – they behaved wrongly.

This is striking language to attach to a sporting approach. It suggests that something more than tactics or results is at stake: a sense that England should not play like this at all, even if it sometimes works. That British instinct – to recoil from assertiveness when it produces visible risk – runs far beyond cricket.

Australia’s series win has generated a familiar national mood: irritation, self-reproach, and the rapid revival of old certainties. And it comes at the same time as Donald Trump has ratcheted up his country’s assertiveness on the global stage, most strikingly in a recent military operation in Venezuela in which US forces ousted president Nicolás Maduro and brought him to face charges in the United States.

English sporting culture has long prized dignified effort over ruthless success

These two stories appear unrelated – one is sport, the other geopolitics. Yet together they expose a deeper national unease. Across the international system, boldness has become the operating norm for great powers, not only the United States but Russia and China as well. Britain, too, remains a great power by any conventional measure: nuclear-armed, globally deployed, and economically significant. Yet here boldness is treated not as a tool of influence but as a character flaw – something to be justified, hedged, or........

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