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One kick to save the world. How many garage doors bear the scars of such a kick?

This kick to win the match, this kick and they’ll believe the dog ate my homework, this kick to make everything all right, this kick to save my life, this kick and the entire universe will be safe throughout eternity.

Place the ball carefully, like the thing of great value that it is, despite being faded, scuffed, the victim of a million kicks and never the same since the last time the dog joined in.

Stand back. Hear the silence of the crowd. Savour the bated breath of that universe. And then crash, the ball smacks home, leaving a faint muddy scar, joining 100,000 others on the black chipped paint.

Mostly, you let the applause, the relief of the nation, wash over you.

You don’t raise your arms, in case anybody is watching. And then you collect the ball. There will be more desperate ordeals in the future; in the meantime, the world being duly saved, it is time for fish fingers and milk jelly.

There can be very few adult males who have not saved the world in the course of their childhood, and done so with a wild kick and a damaged football. We all know how it feels; and that is why David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson are so greatly beloved.

This week Beckham snapped his Achilles tendon. He will miss the World Cup this summer. It seems that his career as an England footballer may be over; perhaps his life as a professional footballer has ended.

This same week Wilkinson was dropped as fly half for the England rugby union team. This was partly because of his inaccurate place-kicking. It’s like sacking the Queen for foul and abusive language.

Wilkinson goes to the replacements’ bench, so he may even get on the pitch in England’s last match of the RBS Six Nations Championship against France in Paris tomorrow. He might recover form and play some more great games for England; Wilkinson is not of the giving-up kind.

But it has been a chastening few weeks, a serious personal setback, and it is possible that his time as an England player is finished.

There is a certain symmetry about these events. There is a strange link between Beckham and Wilkinson. They both had one kick to save the world.

Each man’s career can be summed up in a single strike, one instant of contact between boot and ball, one single moment of perfection; perfect connection, perfect strike and perfect result bringing an overwhelming emotional response from the nation they represented.

Beckham was first. It was 2001, the England football team were in disarray, their qualification campaign for the World Cup in crisis. Kevin Keegan, the manager, had resigned in tears. In came the exotic — that’s how he seemed then — Sven-Göran Eriksson.

He retained Beckham as the newly installed captain, England beat Germany 5-1 and as the final round of group matches were played out, all they — we — needed was a draw against Greece at Old Trafford.

But Greece were leading 2-1 after 90 minutes and it had all gone horribly wrong. There was despair in the air and desperation on the pitch. England won yet another free kick and Beckham had yet another crack. Just north of the D, dead centre.

The right-foot curler started middle, swerved drastically just inside the post and a tsunami of emotion engulfed the nation. Beckham was BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 2001.

Two years later it was time for Wilkinson. It was the final of the rugby World Cup in Sydney. England, the dominant side of the tournament, were playing Australia. Bizarre refereeing constantly gave the advantage to Australia. A draw. Extra time. Still tied, 17-17. And still England frustrated, unable to make their superiority tell.

In the last minute, they called the play named “Zigzag”. Matt Dawson’s knifing little dart. Martin Johnson’s crash-ball. Dawson’s swivel-pass to Wilkinson — and then, with an air of sweet inevitability, a languorous, easy, almost lazy swing of the right leg in a moment in which all time ceased, and then the ball was end-over-ending through the uprights and England had won the World Cup. Wilkinson was the BBC Sports Personality for 2003.

One kick for the world. The World Cup, anyway. The rugby union team won it; the football team at least qualified for it; and both times it was a miracle of composure and accuracy, a simple, private skill enacted in the maelstrom of a match with thousands watching and screaming and many millions more in tears on the sofas of old England.

Each man has fulfilled this central childhood fantasy. Each had done for real what the rest of us had dreamt of a million times: saved the world with a single kick. How could these people fail to become specially beloved members of the nation’s most cherished collection of heroes?

It helps that they are both good people. Beckham, for all his nonsense, is proud to be a family man, besotted with his children, genuinely wanting to be a force for good. There is a moral centre to his life and it isn’t money or ambition.

Sure, Beckham was involved in a bit of a kerfuffle when he was lonely in his early days with Real Madrid, but that was soon put right. Beckham shaved his head in contrition — he is a man who best expresses himself in the medium of the haircut.

Wilkinson has a similar moral centre; a man of deep loyalties, team values, a sense of decency so pronounced that it makes him look unworldly.

He became an emblem of persistence and inner strength as he accepted a dreadful series of injuries and worked without let-up for a rehabilitation most normal people thought impossible. The two are antithetical in their off-pitch lives, Beckham needing fuss and fame and attention, Wilkinson craving quietness and privacy.

There is a division, for only one of them won the World Cup. But it is the combination of the fantasy fulfilment and the moral centre that unites them and makes them the best-loved English athletes of the past decade.

We like our sporting heroes not just to be good at sport, but to be good people as well. Although there is no obvious connection between sporting ability and moral worth, we have a deep need to believe that successful athletes are people worthy of admiration on more than one level. Beckham and Wilkinson, Jonny and Becks: both good at kicking a ball to save the world, both thoroughly good eggs as well.

We are more or less willing to canonise the pair of them: St Jonny of the oval ball, St David of the round. Each was responsible for a miracle, or what seemed like one; each was responsible for answering the prayers of a nation in a single Damascene moment that made believers of us all.

Great athletes are not necessarily decent men, but we have a special place for those who are.