Apparently England were rubbish. Terrible. Hugely disappointing. Such sentiments have been expressed everywhere and you have to say they look rather incongruous because they have to be dispensed beneath a 5-1 winning scoreline. It seems an unlikely result to produce a round of tooth-sucking and head-wagging.

The conventional view is that the scoreline is wrong. Not factually incorrect, but it fails to give a faithful view of an England performance. Somewhere deep in the artistic merit side of things, England have failed.

Now I have been pondering this matter and wishing that all the failures of my life were attached to such brilliant results. And I think I have stumbled across an important truth about English football. The opinion-mongers must, by definition of their trade, make up their minds at half-time.

The studio pundits must have a view halfway through, while those of us who pound the laptops in the press box must, poor demented souls that we are, be well into our reports by the time the second half begins. Once either opinion-monger is committed to a view, it is hard, if not impossible, to change the mind completely.

England went into half-time against Kazakhstan at 0-0, so obviously it was a dreadful performance. The turnaround came too late for this view to be modified, so it has to be seen as a poor performance in which England, against the run of play, against the moral momentum of the occasion, somehow scored five goals.

We don't judge horse racing in such terms. If we had, say, taken a 15-minute break for opinion-forming halfway through the Arc in 1986, we would have said that Dancing Brave was running poorly, giving a disappointing performance that showed up all the ills of our nation. We would have had much the same view at three-quarter time and, for that matter, had it been necessary to form our view with ten seconds of the race to be run.

But then Dancing Brave turned on the afterburners and roared through to win one of the most brilliant waiting races ever ridden and everybody said that it was one of the greatest races and the greatest horses we had seen. In other words, in sport it is mighty helpful to know the result before you start pontificating.

This luxury is denied us in football, which makes for uncomfortable nights such as the one when England were beating France 1-0 at the 2004 European Championship finals as the match entered stoppage time, and then contrived to lose 2-1 after I, like most of the press, had filed my copy.

These things are sent to try us and they become part of the legends that journalists make for themselves. But the need to have a view before we have a result is something that warps our understanding of football in general and the national team in particular. Me, I thought it was a jolly good result - and so will everyone else in England's qualification group.

Dressage ill-served by Ms Price's lip service

They keep telling me it's good for the sport. Good for the sport to have a bimbo in a silly hat doing a dressage performance while sitting like a sack of spuds. That was Katie Price, aka Jordan, performing at the Horse of the Year Show in Birmingham last week while wearing half a dozen protective layers of make-up.

Oh, she brought the house down all right, but it wasn't silly little girls who want to be dressage riders, it was silly little girls who want to be supermodels. Just one more bit of fame culture, adroitly manipulated by someone who is famous for being famous.

Good on her for having a go and all that, and for her correctly self-disparaging line “at least I didn't fall off”. Her sudden embracing of equestrianism does make the excellent point that the horsey world is in many ways a classless society. I'm all for kicking out stuffiness, but dressage is a thing of beauty by itself and it needs no pouting and no lip gloss to make it so.

The best advertisement for sport is sport, and sport at the highest level of attainment is better than anything any publicist could dream of. Having a go is one thing, but great sport is a different matter.

Apparently, Ms Price is aiming at the Olympic Games in 2012. Well, I'll just have to apologise very nicely when she makes it, won't I?

Flaws hint at Hamilton's growing uncertainty

Any failing by a young person is likely to be forgiven at a rush, generally with the words, spoken with absolute authority: “He'll grow out of it.” This is a proposition I have always found suspect. The character traits you possess as a young person frequently stay with you in age, becoming not muted but exaggerated by the passage of time.

That is often the case in sport, an area of life that is greatly concerned with the young and which is so effective at revealing the characters of the young people it puts to the test. What we must do now is ask whether Lewis Hamilton is growing out of it or whether the flaws in his tilt at the Formula One drivers' championship are deep-seated and ineradicable weaknesses in himself.

He blew a certainty last season: headstrong, impulsive, rash, intemperate, he squandered a lead of 17 points. But because it was his first season, we were rightly forgiving and said that he would learn and come back a stronger and wiser competitor.

Sometimes this season it seems that he has done exactly that. And sometimes it seems that he is incapable of doing anything of the kind. His tendency to spin from triumph to disaster was never better shown than in the Japanese Grand Prix yesterday. His poor start was followed by an overzealous attempt to put things right, to put the toothpaste back in the tube, and it led to failure, entanglement in traffic and a pointless weekend.

His talents are enough to mean that he can still run away with the championship, but the latest revelation of his unreformed blind-panic, pedal-to-metal inner nature means that none of us will be putting the mortgage on it. Perhaps he is no more capable of growing out of his impulsiveness than he is of growing out his nose.

Giant steppes are taken by Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world and the 121 places listed as “important bird areas” in that country cover more space than England. It's the steppes that do it, of course, the Central Asian (what are Kazakhstan doing in the same qualification group as England?) grassland that holds two of the world's 190 species of critically endangered birds.

These are the sociable lapwing and the Siberian crane, left, and as England scored a great success - or narrowly averted disaster, choose your interpretation - it is good to record that the RSPB, Birdlife International and the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan are committed to saving them. New frontiers for sport are also new frontiers for conservation.

Australian seamers decline to decline yet

I would like to record my disappointment at the Australia seam-bowling attack doing its stuff against India. As we move slowly but inexorably towards the next Ashes series in the summer of 2009, we are reading much about the decline of the Australia seamers. But, alas, they have performed as well as ever in Bangalore. It's about time they had the decency to start declining.