Had Shakespeare been around today no doubt he would have coined a phrase for the current state of British sport. "Now is the summer of our discontent..."

It hasn't been the happiest of times. We seem to have lost our place in the sun. Although not The Sun.

Britain's biggest-selling tabloid was moved to ask in an editorial: "Can we bring back the Olympics?"

The euphoric feel-good factor that followed 2012 - when apart from a Golden Games we had Bradley Wiggins pedalling home in the Tour de France - seems to have vanished in a thick fog of disappointment this year.

Defending champion Andy Murray's 17-match winning streak at Wimbledon ended in something oddly close to an uncharacteristic capitulation, his first Grand Slam loss to a player ranked outside the top 10 in four years.

Andy Murray's uncharacteristic capitulation in his Wimbledon quarter-final came after England's early exit from the World Cup ©Getty Images



It came after England's dispirited football team exited the World Cup, in the group stage, failing to win a match, while in the same month England's equally ignominious cricketers were whitewashed in the Test series against Sri Lanka and the rugby players succumbed 3-0 in theirs in New Zealand.

Summer of discontent? More like a summer of shame as our sport went, you might say, from Bard to worse.

On top of all this one of Britain's great Tour de France hopes, Mark Cavendish, literally crashed out of both this year's race when it began in Yorkshire, and the upcoming Commonwealth Games.

But, as the Monty Python pensioners still say: Always look on the bright side.

Mark Cavendish's injury-forced exit from the Tour de France and Glasgow 2014 has compounded a troubled summer for British sport ©AFP/Getty Images



Chris Froome, the defending champion, is still in there and the UK stages of Le Tour at least recalled the spirit of the 2012 Olympics by reminding us that the nation can still put on a sporting show of supreme quality.

And finally the gloom was punctuated at the weekend by Lewis Hamilton's storming victory in the British Grand Prix.

Now it is over to Glasgow, where we must hope the Scots can produce a mini-London to demonstrate to the world - or at least the Commonwealth - that British sport is not permanently hung-over after 2012.

All the indications are that Glasgow will make a decent fist of it, despite, as we pointed out here last week, missing a trick by lobbing tennis out of the Games schedule where its inclusion would have given Murray the ideal opportunity for a spot of gentle tournament rehab after his shock Wimbledon exit.

With Olympic icon Sir Chris Hoy, their other favourite sporting son, no longer competing, Scotland go into their Games without a globally recognised standard bearer.

No matter. At least flag-waving First Minister Alex Salmond should be able to rely on expert stage management and slick Caledonian showmanship to demonstrate Scotland's ability to stylishly do their thing; it certainly won't harm his desire to celebrate an Independence Day a month later.

Meantime, we Sassenachs will still be inwardly smarting and shaking despondent heads over our under-performing, overpaid ball players, especially Roy Hodgson's unmerry men.

Roy Hodgson is paid a handsome wage as England manager, but there has been little to show for it in Brazil ©AFP/Getty Images



The England manager, handsomely rewarded at £3.2 million a year ($5.4 million/€4 million), must be mightily relieved that domestic reaction to the World Cup debacle seems one of apathy rather than anger.

Not so in Russia, whose team, like England, failed to win a game and whose coach Fabio Capello - the only World Cup manager paid more than Hodgson - has been hauled before parliament and given a dressing down.

One MP even demanded that should either be fired or return half, or all, his £7 million ($11.9 million/€8.8 million) salary.

Sports minister Helen Grant, from whom we haven't heard a peep following her Brazil visit, will be equally relieved that the Government aren't as outraged as Ghana's, which has sacked its own sports Minister after the team's early dismissal.

Grant's immediate boss, the Culture Secretary Sajid David, has been equally mute, as has the one figure - apart from Hodgson - who should have something to say about it: Greg Dyke, the usually vociferous chair of an increasingly dysfunctional England Football Association that had such a ridiculously top-heavy presence in Brazil.

This silence is by no means golden.

What does speak volumes, however, is that those who have failed to achieve are among the most richly-rewarded in the world, evidence that while money talks, it does not always bring the expected results.

I tend to share the growing view that several elements of British sport have become bloated by over-funding.

Much of our elite sport is now is now awash with money, yet appetite for victory apparently is diminishing.

Whatever happened to the Hunger Games?

Balance this with the continuing scandal of those much-played sports - notably basketball, so much identified with inner city and minority communities - which have been unfairly deprived of all financial incentive and have to watch enviously as funding for winter sports is astonishingly doubled.er boss.tyhe Cuoltyure SXecretyarfy

Theirs truly is a summer of discontent.

To borrow from the Bard again, 'tis time someone in the sports Ministry made much ado about those getting nothing.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning  sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.