I write about this in Prisoner of Trebekistan, because it comes up in Jeopardy!
(in the betting, mostly), it comes up in sports, it comes up in re-taking Congress, and it comes up in
everyday life: play to win, and you often win; play not to
lose, and you usually lose.

Taking a break, I watched the TiVo
of yesterday’s action in the second Ashes cricket test between England
and Australia.  (For those new here, in the last few years I have become a tragic Aussie
cricket fan.) 
It was the final day of a test England badly needed to win or draw, and in the first two days they had built a massive advantage.  By the morning of day three,
Australia’s statistical chance of winning was near zero, although by the end of day four the Aussie batsmen had least fought back enough to make a draw the most likely outcome.

However… ever
watch an American football team with a massive lead blow it in the
fourth quarter by going to a "prevent" defense, allowing the other team
to dominate the game simply out of fear of making an ordinary if costly
mistake?

That’s what England just did.  Both batting and
bowling, for the entire fifth day of the match.  More than eight solid hours of psychological backpedalling.  And they wound up
losing by six wickets as a result.

Granted, a couple of bad
calls from the umps didn’t help, but the umpires didn’t make the Brits run themselves out, play defensive strokes until their run rate fell by half, or swing wildly at balls two feet away from the stumps.

And granted, the Aussies certainly had a hand
in things.  Shane Warne, he of the unspooling testicles,
uncorked one unbelievable delivery that curved about a foot to the right
in the air before bouncing back almost two feet back to the left. 
There’s no YouTube yet of that particular ball, but the Gooch ball on
this video, the fourth one shown (and do feel free to skip the chat),
is pretty similar:

(Incidentally, while the Gatting ball arguably changed the way cricket is played, for my money the second one on this reel, the "Chanderpaul ball" of 1996, is the coolest to watch.)

But
flashes of Aussie brilliance aside, England simply stopped trying to
play shots while batting, and then in the field, instead of attacking
the Aussie batsmen with their best and letting the shots fall where
they may, they spread the field, put in a lame spin bowler, and simply
tried not to give up too many runs, exactly the way American football
coaches do when trying to hang onto a lead instead of just playing the
damn game.  The result —

— was almost inevitable.

Perhaps worth noting for future Jeopardy! players, the Dems in ’08, etc.

PS: The BBC live-blogged the day here. 
Read from the bottom up, and watch pleasant cheeriness gradually
overcome with a sense of inevitable doom.  Any Cleveland sports fans
out there will surely sympathize.