Many years ago in Dubai when the Monday night squash league was fun I remember one match leading 9-0, 9-0, 6-0 and thinking okay, this is a cakewalk. Suddenly, the opponent changed tack and before I knew it he had won the third game and was cruising in the fourth.

A team mate, yelled, “Come on, get on with it and show some bottle.”

I didn’t, scrambling like a rabbit and winning the fifth only because the other guy tinned two shots for a 10-8 score.

I had no game plan, no strategy, only panic and desperate measures, hoping to get by with a little bit of luck and a sliver of talent that had dramatically evaporated.

Show some bottle.

It is a phrase that has stayed with me all these years and I can still wake up at night and feel that terrible sense of despair that I didn’t have the gravel in the gut that night when it was needed.

Arsen Wenger said much the same thing to the Gunners in March last year after their pathetic defeats against Chelsea and Liverpool. It is a very Cockney word and indicates either a display of courage and determination when you are under fire or a lack of these qualities when you are under pressure. Show your mettle, step up, be professional. The genesis is loosely based on ‘glass’ rhyming with ‘arse’ and moving that part of your body when demanded, like Eliza Dolittle exhorting Dover, the racehorse,  in My Fair Lady. Over the years the crudeness was refined to the word ‘bottle.’

Like the Indian cricket team has clearly lost its bottle and, despite hope springing eternal in the Indian breast, is not likely to show it in this dismal ‘here we go again just like in England’ display of poor gamesmanship. It is not the lack of application and the general casualness in the approach because these are now common features in Indian cricket where they are tigers in their own tank and mewling little pussycats abroad.

It is the body language. They truly don’t seem to care that they are getting a hiding. They are not even embarrassed. It is like there is so much financial cushion, so much confidence that they cannot be removed, so many fans who will still love them despite doing badly that they really don’t give a damn.

The bowling is as penetrative as a wet noodle, the batting is as wobbly as Jell-O and Gambhir and Laxman should really be on a plane back to India. Which brings me to the point: why are the selectors not held culpable for their choices … after all, their performance in picking the team indicts them for being failures. Pull them up and change them, change the whole team. Too many sacred cows mooing around and chewing cud. Who is governing our sport and why don't they ever pay?

For once, even I admit that there is an error in making this Tendulkar 100th century more important than the Test result. The team’s lost its nerve and is seeking shelter in one man’s glory.