What Jana Novotna means for South Africa

Anyone can choke. Just about every champion that ever lived has blown a winning lead. The trick is not to do it again. Not to get into the habit. Not to become a serial choker. Not to see opponents licking their lips when you take the lead. Not to hear the jokes starting.

South Africa have never won a match in the knockout phase of the World Cup and they've been trying since 1992. It's a fact that weighs on them, in the way that the world weighs on the shoulders of Atlas. They blew a winning position in three of the last four World Cups and collapsed like a house of cards in the fourth.

But I have an answer. It doesn't involve facing up to facts. It doesn't involve getting better individually or corporately. It doesn't involve macho role models and the fear that real men don't choke.

Jana Novotna. She's the answer. Novotna outdid even South Africa when it came to choking on the big stage. She gave us what was probably the most grotesque choke in the history of sport.

In the Wimbledon ladies' singles final of 1993, she was totally in control. The presentation party were almost on the court. She had got there with her dynamic serve-and-volley game and was in the shape of her life. She had already beaten Gabriela Sabatini and Martina Navratilova and was hardly out of her depth against Steffi Graf in the final.

She lost the first set on a tiebreaker but cruised the second 6-1. She was leading 4-1 in the decider and had a point for 5-1. That's when she double-faulted. Doubt and fear consumed her. Graf took the next five games to win. Novotna sobbed on the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent: perhaps the all-time image of the choker at work.

But in 1998, Novotna was back on centre court for the ladies' singles final. She beat Venus Williams and Martina Hingis to get there, and in the final she beat Nathalie Tauziat. In all the intervening years she had never for a second accepted that she had ever choked, and she believes to this day that her victory against Tauziat proves it.

In other words, you don't even have to get the psychologics right. You can be in denial and still pull it off. It just takes the right day, the right opponents, and a moment of absent-mindedness: a moment when you forget it's a special occasion - no, it's just another day at the office to show us with your hard-won, long-practised skills.

So be like Jana, boys, and you can't go wrong.

You can't blame South Africa for 1992. That's when they were undone by a glitch in the new rain rule method, which informed that rather 22 runs off 13 balls they now needed 21 off one*. And you can only blame them a bit for 1996, when they dropped Allan Donald and then found that they couldn't get Brian Lara out.

It was 1999 that set the tone: the black farce of the run-out with Donald running batless to his doom. One run needed, three balls to get 'em: and it was Jana Rides Again. So at the next World Cup South Africa got most of the way there against Sri Lanka as the rain threatened. Then it fell in big drops. So Mark Boucher patted the last ball of the over for a dot and off they came. Boucher had believed that 229 runs was enough under Duckworth-Lewis. He had been scandalously misinformed. The correct figure was 230. Whose brain, I wonder, had been so addled that he muffed a comparatively straightforward calculation? It seems that South Africa have a love affair with sporting farce.

In 2007, South Africa's batsmen were blown away by Australia: five wickets in the first ten overs. That's just sport, even if the group failure looked a lot like nerves. Last time round they lost to New Zealand. They were 108 for 2 chasing 222, and were all out for 172. There was more than a touch of Jana about that one too. It seems they can't escape from her clutches.

We traditionally think of the problem as an individual thing: as one person's psychological frailty. South Africa have caused us to redefine the whole concept of choking. It can not only affect an entire team, it can affect a team from one generation to the next. And that's the great mystery of it.

It would be easy to call this a flaw in the national character, and it's fun to tease South Africans by implying exactly that. The rich mixture of races involved in South African cricket argues against this being a genetic trait. Nor does it stack up as characteristic of South African athletes: their rugby team won the World Cup in 1995. That was when Nelson Mandela turned up in a springbok shirt with the name of the - Afrikaner - captain Francois Pienaar on the back.

There could hardly have been more pressure on the team that day but they used it as inspiration. They won a very tight match in extra time. So it's not about national character: it's about history.

You fail because you failed before. It's the closed feedback loop of form: and the quest to break it is one of sport's endless fascinations. The England cricket team would love to do it right now. You can practise your skills all day long but it's comparatively easy to get better at playing. The hard thing is to get better at winning.

How will it be for South Africa as this World Cup gets to the sharp end? Who will see the top edge spiral skywards and pray: please God, don't let it be me that drops it? Who will swipe when he should block, or block when he should hit out? Who will find his brain full of fog when the sport gets tight?

Why do South Africa choke? Simple: because they choked before. It appears history is to blame. How can they stop choking? The world waits for the answer. But Jana did stop, and so, in the end, will they.

*March 17, 5pm: This line was corrected to remove a reference to the Duckworth-Lewis method