There's a good deal of angst at the moment over the state of Bermuda's major sports. An unsatisfactory draw by the national football team against the Cayman Islands coincided with a humiliating defeat to Guyana in the Stanford 20/20 tournament by the national cricket team.

Bermuda's Under 19 cricket team have been humbled by a string of teams in preparation for the World Cup, while they lost badly to Bangladesh in their first match of the Under 19 World Cup yesterday. That coincided with Bermuda's women cricketers entering the record books in the worst kind of way when they lost to South Africa in a women's World Cup qualifier.

Some perspective is needed. Bermuda has punched above its weight for decades and we now seem to be expect this country of 65,000 to be world beaters in any sport we attempt.

It's worth remembering too that these are games, and not, Bob Shankly's famous aphorism notwithstanding, matters of life and death. To be sure, success in sports makes everyone feel good, but it does not put food on the table or do much to raise the quality of life of anyone apart from possibly a few sportsmen and sportswomen.

That's not to say that Bermuda shouldn't strive for excellence in sports, or that we should not expect our teams to be well prepared and administered. But we should not turn every defeat into a national catastrophe, any more than we should turn a victory into evidence that somehow Bermuda's is better in every respect than the country it just defeated.