Byline: By Carolyn Hitt
When not writing about seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Keats penned a sound-bite that could have come straight out of a sports psychology manual. 'Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience,' mused the poet. 'Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success.'
But political correctness decrees otherwise. 'Failure' should be banned from the classroom and replaced with 'deferred success' declared the retired primary school teacher who put the mohair jumper into woolly liberalism this week.
Alastair Campbell must wish he'd added that phrase to his Bumper Book of Spin. The Lions weren't hammered by the All Blacks they just underwent a sustained period of deferred success. But you can't ban the F-word from sport - and we're not talking about Craig Bellamy's expletive of choice, as discussed in some detail in Sir Bobby Robson's new autobiography.
Some schools have attempted to expel the F-word with the oxymoron that is the Non-Competitive Sports Day. Lest the little ones demand post-traumatic stress counselling after coming fifth in the sack race, events are created where nobody actually wins.
They're also banning Parents Races because their 'over zealous' desire to triumph is putting them at risk of injury. Teachers are concerned that aggressive behaviour displayed by pushy mums and dads could be a health and safety issue.
Yet everyone knows the only damage inflicted by 20 mothers thundering across the grass with their skirts tucked into their knickers is the extreme embarrassment suffered by their offspring.
Yet in the Olympics of life, youngsters need to know how to lose as well as win. How else will they cope with an outside world where even the fight for a parking space is an exercise in ruthless competition.
On the learning curve of sport, failure is as important a lesson as success. Paula Radcliffe will be a better athlete for weeping in a crumpled heap on an Athens roadside than if her career had never hit a pit-stop. Kelly Holmes endured years of setbacks before her golden double payback. Clive Woodward's selection nightmare gave Gavin Henson sleepless nights in New Zealand but he'll be stronger for it.
But perhaps the ultimate example of how to meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same is the Welsh rugby team.
In Wales Grand Slam 2005 - the revealing official book of the campaign launched this week - the players give their own insights on how 27 years of failure turned into achievement.
'To find out where our success began you have to go back to some of the bad times we experienced together,' explains Gareth Thomas. 'You have to respect the foundations that were laid under previous coaches and you have to understand the feeling that existed between the players. We worked hard together and we grew together.'
Martyn Williams, the Six Nations player of the tournament, agrees the team's strength was forged when they refused to give up in the dark days. 'Since we won the Grand Slam every other person has asked me what made the difference from previous seasons. After all, we are more or less the same group of players who over the previous two seasons conceded a Six Nations whitewash, got beaten in Italy and quite often failed to raise a smile for our fans. Well, the success of 2005 was a long time in the making and has to be put down to hard work, more hard work and even more hard work.
'As a group of players we never gave up on ourselves or each other and we always believed we had the talent to compete with other nations.'
Which just goes to show Keats was right. Let's just hope after 27 years of potholes on that highway to success, the road ahead is clear.
