A history of failure: England's latest wretched collapse is a national disgrace

It's the hope that makes it hurt.

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth after England’s rugby team lost to Australia to become the first host nation to tumble out of the World Cup at the group stage. And a fair few sore heads judging by some of the frazzled folks wandering around Twickenham on Sunday morning looking like they had drowned in a vat of Bombardier with Prince Harry, their misplaced sense of national price torn to pieces by Lancaster's Bombers.

Yet the element of shock that greets such hasty departures from these costly tournaments is more surprising than the inevitable failure that precedes it. Depression tends to follow false hope. When it's so predictable and so much an eccentric part of the English sporting psyche, why so much fresh despair over such an ongoing pestilence?

Is the collapse of Stuart Lancaster’s side such a ritual shock when you consider England, the inventors of football and rugby union, have won only two World Cups in the history of the sports they gave to the world? For some reason, England continue to encourage a swollen nation pride in football, rugby and probably cricket above most other team games, which lends itself to a large dollops of disappointment and a morbid acceptance of failure that inevitably tends to clamp themselves to such events whenever England are ejected. Usually long before their time.

The muting of the Three Lions or the wilting of the English Rose is a hand-me-down from generation to generation in England's green and pleasant lands - and it all stems from a delusional sense of self-worth that is undermined by a mental fragility when push comes to shove.

When the Aussies were pushing on Saturday night, England weren't shoving. Even if they had summoned Winston Churchill via a ouija board at half-time, England were going down at Twickers quicker than big Dan Cole, a figure who had espoused the benefits of male bounding prior to the World Cup, buying his front row a round of shots.

"Losing in front of your home crowd," wrote Morrissey in the song Boxers around about the same time Jonah Lomu was flogging Will Carling and chums in the 1995 World Cup. "You wish the ground would open and take you down. And will time ever pass?" Will time ever pass for English hurt?

After clasping the football World Cup in 1966 when they played all their matches at Wembley, England have never been back to a World Cup final or a European Championship football final. They reached the semi-finals of the 1990 tournament with Gazza in Italy, and the last eight of the World Cups in 1970, 1986, 2002 and 2006, but over a 49-year period that is pretty meagre pickings for a country that classifies itself as the traditional home of the world game.

The European Championship is hardly a rich harvest with a run to the last four of Euro ‘96 - when they again played all their matches at Wembley - the main highlight of 56 years of competing in what many commentators regard as a tournament stronger than the World Cup.

The rugby boys have reached the World Cup final three times since the inception of the event in 1987 – in 1991, 2003 and 2007. They beat Australia to win the tournament in 12 years ago to avenge their 12-6 defeat to the Aussies in 1991, but that has been your lot. England recovered from suffering a 36-0 drubbing by South Africa at the 2007 tournament to reach the final where they lost 15-6 to the Springboks in Paris. The past two World Cups have harvested severe depression, witnessing losses at the quarter-final stage to France and the group stage this year.

There is talk of Lancaster’s side being a work in progress, but he was appointed coach early in 2012 after a spot of dwarf-tossing and Manu Tuilagi jumping into Auckland harbour amid the 2011 tournament in New Zealand, where off-pitch antics helped bury Martin Johnson's career as coach.

Johnson must be having a chuckle to himself. He at least won the Six Nations as a coach, and led the team to the quarter-finals of the World Cup where they lost only to eventual runners-up France. Which is more than Lancaster achieved despite all the lofty talk of evolution and revolution.

There is a debate raging about the merits of staying the course with Lancaster, as England did with Clive Woodward in 1999 and New Zealand with Graham Henry in 2007, because he is building for the future.

But that future was supposed to be here, and now. Lancaster was supposed to be driving towards leaving a legacy after this World Cup. Anybody who seriously thinks England can win the World Cup in 2019 is fraternising with more delusion.

Under Lancaster, England have not won the Six Nations in four attempts at the tournament - something which, once again, the much-vilified Johnson did prior to that year's World Cup. Does winning no longer matter?

But as Guardian rugby writer Andy Bull pointed out in an unflinching piece for the Observer on Sunday:

Former England player Mark Cueto made the most sense speaking to the BBC this morning.

It was a similar scenario at last year’s football World Cup finals in Brazil when England lived in the lap of luxury in Brazil before being tossed aside. Like Lancaster, Roy Hodgson was delusional about what could be achieved. Defeats to Italy and Uruguay saw Hodgson’s side return to Manchester Airport only 25 days after departing for a pre-World Cup training base in Miami.

No stone was apparently left unturned when England travelled to South America with the Football Association sending 80 staff to Brazil, including doctors, fitness and conditioning coaches, sports scientists and video analysts, paying £100,000 for a training pitch that was hardly used. Yet England still came up woefully short, fetching a point from Costa Rica after their hopes were maimed. The previous World Cup in South Africa saw England represent a form of wounded game as they were shelled 4-1 by Germany's blunderbuss in a football mercy killing.

England don’t generally fare any better at World Cups in cricket. They last reached the final of the one-day international World Cup final back in 1992 when Ian 'Beefy' Botham was on the go and they lost to Pakistan in the final, but the English cricket team are generally a bit of a farce - barring their freak win at the 2010 World T20 - when it comes to trying unearth a formula to compete with livelier nations in the shorter forms of the game. This year's tournament was a case in point: defeats to Ireland and Bangladesh were the bleakest of moments, but hardly barmy in the grand scheme of things. Like the rugby and football, a shocking lack of technique is the main flaw attached to a game as romantically English as the works of Alan Bennett.

Britain will contest a Davis Cup final for the first time since 1978 when they face Belgium next month, but this will be carried by a Scotsman Andy Murray, his Scottish brother Jamie and a Scottish captain Leon Smith. And if Andy Murray wasn't encouraged by Spain in his formative years, it is unlikely GB would be anywhere near tennis utopia in Ghent.

Thanks goodness for English sporting treasures such as Phil Taylor and Eric Bristow. But if you exclude darts, snooker and bowls, sports where you can take a breather with pint, traditional Olympic sports in rowing, sailing and cycling are three sports where England continue to produce champions, gold medals and prominent winners, but there is an individual element to them that is missing in team sports. The funding in sports like rowing is measured by success. If athletes in rowing don't perform, they don't get paid.

Acquiring success in rugby and football are extremely difficult when you don’t have players who possess the skill set or are mentally tough enough. Australia simply contain more potent, ruthless rugby players just as Italy and Uruguay possessed sharper footballers. There is no substitute for class in sport, and it can't be delivered by basking in the FA or RFU's largesse. The most shocking statistics from the Rugby World Cup is the cost of it. All of the 2.4m tickets have been sold, some at rip-off prices of round £715. England's elimination has apparently cost the country "half a billion" in lost revenue.

Yet the poverty of the country's play and their exit from their own tournament should be regarded as the real national disgrace.