What virtue is there in losing heavily?

I reckon that old yarn about it not being the winning but the competing that matters was thought up by someone with my old school's basketball team in mind, so that we could look in the mirror the morning after a drubbing without feeling ashamed, mortified and humiliated by the mere sight of our own faces. (The only slam dunkin' we ever did was in our dreams, with the help of a stepladder).

Whether or not anyone would have been brave enough to express those fine sporting sentiments in the Italian rugby team's dressing room after Thursday's 101-3 reverse against the All Blacks one can't be sure, but one doubts it.

When their soccer-playing cousins returned from the 1994 World Cup in America, where they lost to Brazil on penalties at the end of the final (the final, mark you), their manager was pelted with tomatoes at the airport in Rome. They weren't sun-dried tomatoes either - they were soggy and smelly and the size of melons. If Italy cares about rugby - and one suspects it doesn't - one dreads to thinks what missiles will be hurled at their team (played three, lost three, conceded 196 points) when they return home as the first nation to be eliminated from the 1999 Rugby World Cup. There was no ticker-tape parade for the Belgian women's hockey team through the streets of Brussels back in August either. I watched them appear on the same pitch as Holland at the European Championships in Cologne - I could have said they "played" Holland but that would have been a potentially misleading, inaccurate, imprecise and inexact representation of the truth. Sorry, a "lie" (see what watching the Public Accounts Sub-Committee on certain Revenue Matters on TG4 does to you?). Holland had chosen that irritatingly catchy tune that topped the young people's hit parade recently - you know the one, Blue (Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Da Ba Dee) - as their goalscoring-celebrating tune, Belgium had picked My Favourite Game by Swedish pop combo The Cardigans. By full time we'd heard "Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Dee, Da Ba Da Ba Dee" 15 times and vowed if we ever heard it again we wouldn't be responsible for our actions. The nice man whose job it was to play these tunes and who had parted with £4.99 for a copy of My Favourite Game had, sadly, wasted his money. Final score? Holland 15, Belgium 0, so we never did get to hear The Cardigans, but I'm told it's a stompin' number. Later that day a man by the name of Chris Spice (known as "Sporty" to his friends), speaking in his capacity as English Hockey Performance Director, rued the inclusion in the tournament of teams that simply provided target practice for the serious contenders. "Kick us while we're down, why don't ya," Belgium were entitled to respond. "It's the old European preference for participation over performance and it's doing nothing to help raise the standards of European hockey at any level," Spice argued.

Because he wanted the number of teams in the tournament reduced from 12 to eight and because Ireland finished ninth the Irish press corps expressed outrage at his proposal and stormed off to the hospitality tent in protest. But he was right. The only thing Belgium's hockey players learnt from the tournament was that they weren't very good and, I'd hazard a guess, most chucked their hockey sticks in to the nearest bin on their return home. It was an entirely pointless exercise them even being there and, in truth, a set of traffic cones would have provided their opponents with as testing an examination.

AIK Solna, Sturm Graz, Molde and Willem II are, perhaps, to the Champions League what the Belgian hockey team was to the European Championships. So far they have amassed one point between them in 12 matches and although they've produced the odd feisty performance (not least AIK Solna at home to Barcelona) they have, largely, looked out of their depth. Last month Johan Cruyff described the Champions League as "decaffeinated", claiming that UEFA had made a bags of the competition by expanding it to 32 teams from 24 (from 16 when it began in 1992). He's right. It's all very nice for AIK Solna, Sturm Graz, Molde and Willem II and their supporters to be involved in the competition until November but does their participation really add to the quality of what is, after all, meant to be the elite competition of European football?

By the time we get to phase two of the Champions League in March many of the serious contenders will be without key players through suspension or injury (so ludicrous is the number of matches these teams now have to play) and it's reached the point where, added to domestic league campaigns, it has become an endurance test rather than a test of quality. Will the winners of next May's European Cup final really be Europe's finest team or will they be the club with the largest squad and the luckiest injury-free run? Nasty cynics, of course, suggest that it's all about money, that UEFA is attempting to create a European Super League by the back door - perish the thought!

But whatever the motivation behind the expansion it has simply served to degrade the greatest of all European club competitions. Competing is all very well but sometimes quality, not quantity, performance, not participation, is preferable. Even the Belgian hockey and Italian rugby teams might agree.