My buddy Yash has a strategy for fixing the mental frailties of the South African cricket team.

“We already have a strategy,” I told him. “The strategy is we keep on calling them chokers and reminding them that they always choke, and we keep doing it until they stop choking.”

“But isn’t that the same strategy the Australians used against us, except they did it to make sure we did keep choking?”

“So?”

“So if you want a certain result, why would you continue doing something that has in the past brought precisely the opposite result?”

That’s what I don’t like about Yash. He always tries to bring a rational element and emotional maturity into conversations about sport.
“Okay, if you’re so clever,” I said, nastily, “what’s your strategy for fixing them?”

“We should,” said Yash, “appoint a coach in a wheelchair.”

“Really?”

“No kidding. Like, a Paralympic athlete, or someone. Then you’ll see them turn around.”

I pondered that. “You mean, they’ll be all moved by his personal courage and overcoming the odds and that, and they’ll be inspired?”

Yash went pale. “Dude,” he said. “Don’t ever let a Paralympic athlete hear you talk like that. You’ll get your knee-caps broken. It’s not about being inspirational. It’s just those dudes know how to win!”

Yash recently entered the world of disabled sport, and even more recently exited it. He played rugby at school and at university, so he figured after his motorbike crash and his rehabilitation and having become familiar with his chair, he’d be able to handle a bit of wheelchair basketball, no problem. Like me, he’d been expecting the world of the disabled athlete to be a sort of uplifting Disney movie in which plucky enthusiasts encourage each other to rise against the odds and let their human spirits triumph. Instead he got his ass kicked.

“Dude, I’m not playing with those guys!” he said. “They’re hard core! One guy tipped me out of my chair and tried to ride over me! And the insults! There’s no bonding – they just want to win!”

In a world in which we’ve pretty much given up the old daydreams about sportsmanship and Olympic codes and Beautiful Games, we often try and transfer those old ideals onto Paralympians, as though a one-legged shot-putter or armless butterfly swimmer were lit by a sporting flame purer and more noble than other athletes.

“If you want to be inspired,” one of Yash’s new team-mates told me once, deep into a night of drinking and after many jokes about getting legless, “go watch Oprah. I ain’t your Sea Biscuit, bitch.”

The main lesson that Paralympic athletes teach the rest of us is that a human being with a physical disability is still a human being, subject to all our weaknesses, temptations and character flaws. Scarcely a Paralympics passes without some fresh scandal about a sprinter who made his prosthetic legs more bouncy or a clay-pigeon shooter who can see better than he claims. But my favourite wheeze is “boosting”.

Boosting is the practice of causing what would be physical pain to your body, in regions where you no longer feel it. Typically, you might block off your catheter tube so the bladder fills too much or twist elastic bands round your testicles. The body releases adrenaline to cope with the pain it assumes you’re feeling. Result: personal best for you. In the most extreme case yet uncovered by the poor sods who have to inspect for such things, an Eastern European gentleman nailed his penis to the chair. He claimed it was recreational rather than professional, but officials were unmoved.

I suspect similar techniques, adapted for the able-bodied, might help our sportsmen. Ask Jacques Kallis some algebra problems, say, or Bakkies Botha to name the capital of France, or require that fool Faf du Plessis to remember the fundamental principles of running between wickets, and perhaps their bodies will release some brain-boosting chemicals on the mistaken assumption that they have brains to boost.

“A wheelchair coach will get their heads straight,” said Yash. “No kidding. He’ll teach them about winning.

It’s worth a try. And if it doesn’t work, we can always just nail their penises to the chair.