The Ups and Downs of British Sports LONDON - To be in England in these days of sporting excellence is to know anguish - the agony of expectation, first denied, then raised, then dashed; the pain of faint hope, first fanned, then fizzling. Euro 2012 soccer; Wimbledon tennis; and, on their own ambiguous pedestal, the Olympics. All are, or will be, repositories of a peculiar ability on these islands to create an illusion of optimism, prevailing over the evidence of less illustrious sporting achievement. This is not, it should be said, a story of self-hating Britons, of a traitor's venom. Far more, it is a fond paean to a phenomenon that helps make this land what it is: an enduring talent for recurrent hope that knows, with gritty stoicism, that it will end in tears. When the European soccer championships got under way in Poland and Ukraine, the columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote in The Daily Mail, "I feigned indifference. So what if England lose? Life goes on. But, initially, England did not lose. The pulse began to quicken, the optimism returned. And, of course, in the quarterfinal against Italy, England did lose. "To be honest," Mr. Littlejohn wrote, "it was better when England stuck to the script and crashed out of tournaments prematurely, consumed by hubris and an inflated sense of their own abilities." "I can take the despair," he quoted the actor John Cleese as saying. It's the hope I can't stand. The mood swings are repeated so frequently as to recall a definition of insanity sometimes ascribed to Albert Einstein: "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." But that misses the point. When England's rugby players headed to South Africa a few weeks back, there was some talk that this young and inexperienced David of a team might have a chance against the massed might of a Southern Hemisphere Goliath. Defeat followed defeat in Durban and Johannesburg. Yet, when the two met again in Port Elizabeth, the scoreline told a different tale: a draw, 14-14. Honor was snatched from defeat's grim jaws. "At a very basic level, international sport tests a man's character," Paul Ackford wrote from Port Elizabeth in The Daily Telegraph. England may have plenty to work on come the autumn, but one thing is certain. They will not be short of courage. Or, as Albert Einstein may have once said ... It is tempting to imagine that, if hope and illusion were not so frequently fanned, the players would have more space to redeem the expectations of their fans and the sportswriters. But, as it reluctantly confronts the diminution of its global reach, England seems to prize effort over outcome, guts over glory. "Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning," the reprobate lawyer Robert Dempster proclaims in George Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life," published in 1857, "but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat. In truth, of course, English teams and players do sometimes win and the dates loom large in the sporting psyche, as significant for the soaring joy they recall as their remoteness along the timeline of endeavor: World Cup soccer, 1966; World Cup rugby, 2003. British cricketers, rowers, swimmers, sailors and cyclists have won tournaments and acclaim. Among the teams that form England's elite soccer Premiership, Chelsea emerged as a European champion by beating Bayern Munich. But that league, of course, exemplifies what Louise Taylor in The Guardian called "the celebrity culture which surrounds modern football" with its highly paid superstars and their high-octane lifestyle. Only rarely is that cult challenged, as it was when the selectors for the Team GB soccer squad for the London Olympics rejected David Beckham, the onetime England captain who now plays for LA Galaxy but who, at age 37, Ms. Taylor wrote, "appears to spend as much time modeling underwear and cozying up to politicians and royalty as actually playing football these days." His omission did raise a point, however: Could Beckham reasonably expect to join the team when, Ms. Taylor wrote, he "now suffers from a chronic lack of pace and mobility"? Can sporting acclaim, in other words, be uncoupled from performance? If there is one cockpit of competition in the British calendar to suggest that it cannot, it is the gladiatorial singles tennis at Wimbledon, where no amount of pluck can trump the raw victory of holding the trophy aloft. For years, Britons pinned their hopes for a champion in vain on Tim Henman, giving the name Henman Hill to the sloping lawn outside Center Court, where the less privileged view games relayed on a big screen. Now, Andy Murray of Scotland has become the repository of the same dreams. Henman Hill has been renamed Murray Mound. "Come on, Tim," ghostly voices sometimes seem to echo from the past. "Come on, Andy," a newer generation takes up the refrain.