James Lawton: Australia's winning habit again threatens to expose a clash of sporting cultures

If it should happen that calamity arrives at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseilles today, there is guaranteed a little consolation. It is the welcome one that an Englishman following his team to what seems certain to be their last stand in the World Cup of rugby against Australia is unlikely to be required to wipe spittle from his face because of guilt by association.

That's what happened on several occasions the last time the nation was involved in a significant sporting contest here – a pool game of the World Cup of football in 1998 against Tunisia, a match disfigured by the unfettered violence of drunken yobs dressed in the flag of St George.

I happened to be staying in a hotel room overlooking the old harbour where the English fans drank all day before attacking local immigrant youths waving Tunisian flags. Tear gas, which was being loaded beneath the balcony by the riot police in a scenario which anyone could see permitted only one outcome, still hung in the air when Graham Kelly, the chief executive of the Football Association, was asked if there would ever be a solution.

"Mass executions are out of the question," he said dryly, but there wasn't a lot of laughter in the air, partly because an innocent young English lad had come into the hotel lobby after being ambushed by a retaliating gang from the high-rise flats with his throat cut, fortunately not fatally.

No, it's true, we cannot expect much mirth in the upper echelons of English rugby this afternoon but anyone who was around here nine years ago will not be hard pushed to settle on a certain perspective.

It is that when Australian rugby's chief executive, John O'Neill, caused a small firestorm of controversy with his declaration that "we all hate the English", he was being relatively playful, at least by Aussie standards.

Nine years ago to be English in Marseilles was indeed enough to provoke a combination of hatred and disbelief.

For the Australian fan, for the second time in a year, the feeling is one that can be best categorised as profound irritation that any rival sports nation can besiege itself with so much self-congratulation after the kind of triumph that back home would provoke nothing so much more than a grunt of satisfaction at a routine job done well.

In Brisbane last November a terrible retribution was claimed by the Australian Ashes team. They confessed that they could hardly believed the triumphal march of the England team through Tralfalgar Square and on to Downing Street little over a year earlier. Such feeling erupted when Shane Warne dredged up nearly 20 years of sledging expertise and blasted England's supreme over-achiever Paul Collingwood, an MBE for scoring a handful of runs in the winning series. Warne sneered that Collingwood could have expected a knighthood if he had done a little better.

Of course, a winner is entitled to celebrate however he pleases, but the Australian conviction is that the real ones build on their achievement, they move from one victory to another, and that in the case of England's cricket and rugby teams after their supreme achievements of recent years, almost the precise opposite has been true.

This is the cultural division that separates the two teams today almost as much as the belief of the rugby cognoscenti that Australia are in an excellent position to exact sweeping revenge for their defeat by England in the World Cup final on their own Sydney soil four years ago.

For England there is one supreme encouragement to be gleaned from that now ancient achievement. It is that two of the men who represented the team at a fine edge of competitive belief, Jonny Wilkinson and Jason Robinson, have presented themselves for what can only be described as the most daunting moment of truth in their distinguished careers. Both have already brought glimmerings of distinction to England's essentially wretched campaign.

Robinson ran with marvellous defiance when the last of his team's reputation as the world champions was comprehensively thrashed in the Stade de France a few weeks ago. He was injured and his career pronounced over, but now he reappears, a brave, if desperate figure hoping to light up England's darkness with a burst or two of the old flame.

Wilkinson remains the improbable but imperishable hope for one of the most odds-defying victories in the history of rugby. He is still hardly better than half-fit. His game, never an extrovert statement of unbridled creativity, is crimped by his injuries and maybe the accumulation of disappointment since his moment of glory in the Telstra Stadium.

Some believe that the unheralded Australian youngster Berrick Barnes will coolly pass him by on the high road of sporting history. But then maybe England's pack will find some of the power that has surged only fleetingly so far, perhaps Mike Catt, such a crucial figure in keeping England on track four years ago, will ransack his memory – and his nerve – and provide Wilkinson with some vital support.

Maybe Wilkinson will kick England beyond their fears. It is their last hope, irrational perhaps, but not without a glint of encouragement from the mists of modern rugby history. Certainly, as the autumn sun sinks over the old port, it is the best you can say about England's appointment with what the Australians are convinced is an opportunity to administer some old truths about sport. There is also the fact that, whatever happens, the streets will not be littered with gas cannisters and blood.

Shaming of Jones exposes the delusions of a sport that has survived by denial

When Marion Jones, superwoman and five-medal winner at the Sydney Olympics of 2000, cops a plea based on a confession that she systematically took performance enhancing drugs, we see all over again the scale of the lie with which her sport has lived with for so long.

We also see why so many inhabitants of the real world are outraged by the kind of platitudinous double-talk which so regularly gushes from the athletic establishment when doubts are raised against the honesty, even the viability of the sport which lurches into the global spotlight every four years at the Olympics, which have governments running with caps in hand for the plaudits and the votes that might accompany them, and which unfailingly exhibit a rottenness at their heart.

In Athens three years ago the Olympics were launched by the outrageous behaviour of two of Greece's greatest track stars running from the testers and producing stories that were nothing less than risible. In Seoul in 1988 Ben Johnson perpetuated the supreme, detected untruth when he was stripped of his gold in the 100 metres. Linford Christie, the hero of Barcelona, finished his career under suspension.

But in Sydney, and in the years that followed, no-one practised the big lie more relentlessly than Marion Jones, and no-one more spectacularly confirmed the suspicions of those who conclude that to believe in the greatest of athletic achievement requires an ever more perilous act of faith.

When it was revealed in Sydney that Jones's husband had tested positive, and suspicions inevitably surrounded the great star, she put in the acting performance of her life. She shed her husband as you might a passing infection. She asserted her competitive honesty, she went to court to protect it. She lied and she lied right until the moment she was required to cop that plea.

Perhaps those who were appalled when Britain's Christine Ohuruogu drew doubts along with tumultuous praise when she emerged from suspension – for missing three drug tests – to win a gold medal at the recent world championships, might just pause a little now.

They might reflect that whatever the cause of Ohuruogu's suspension, forgetfulness, as her defenders claim, or something else, it came in a sport where the ability to trust anyone's word has been eroded to the point of dust.

If you don't believe this is true, you should have been in Sydney attending the carefully orchestrated press conference of Marion Jones when the news broke that her husband had failed his test. There, you had the inpenetrable innocence of a great women athlete dragged into controversy quite without cause or reason.

Craig Masback, the chief executive of US Track and Field, declares, "Any use of performance-enhancing substances is a tragedy for the athlete, their friends, family and the sport."

Of course it is all of those things, but it is more. It is another reason to question, every step of the way, a sport which has survived for so long, it is reasonable to believe, on nothing so much as its ability to suppress the truth.