Fever pitch wanes in distant Kazakhstan

Oh God, I thought the football season was over. I expect that's just what the England football team are thinking, too. And just when did Kazakhstan become part of Europe? You really can't fly for seven hours and get out and pretend you're still on the continent of Europe. Just what you need after a long, hard season: a long flight and a banana-skin match at the end of it.

England playing a lowly rated football team on foreign soil in a World Cup qualifier - what could possibly go wrong? Well, it's the uncertainty involved in these matches that will force us to watch with the usual grisly fascination. Odd situation we find ourselves in, watching a sporting event in the hope it will all be over soon without too much to excite us.

It's a tester for Fabio Capello. He hasn't had many games of late as England manager, but his players are sick of the sight of bloody football pitches, much like the audience. The trick is to make the team interested enough to devote sufficient energy and concentration to the task. It should be a suitably dull 90 minutes, and all the more satisfactory for that, but the possibility for low farce will keep us interested.

Pakistan given chance to seize moment

The World Twenty20 has started properly - and with a bang after England’s defeat to the Netherlands last night - and it will be a bit of fun for us all, that’s for sure, if the opening game is anything to go by. What’s more, it is also a chance to try to get over a few snobberies. England play Pakistan tomorrow and I’ll be cheering for Pakistan all the way. Nor is this even remotely unpatriotic — I am a patriot of the nation of cricket.

A good run for Pakistan would be a tremendous thing; a victory for them in the final would be an even more tremendous thing. With the troubles in Pakistan, cricket, one of the essential arts of peace, is struggling to survive. England has splendidly got behind Pakistan in all kind of ways. I think a defeat at the weekend would add to that very nicely indeed.

It is hard to play good, strong, motivated sport when everything is falling apart all around. Besides, Pakistan’s record of cricketing sangfroid is not exactly one hundred per cent. But when those rare moments come and the team are suddenly and briefly unified, anything is possible. So I’m shouting for the cornered tigers.

Kinane has stars on his eyes at Epsom

I once spent a day at Ballydoyle in the company of the great racehorse trainer Aidan O'Brien, a man almost cosmically ill-at-ease with human beings. But then we were out among the horses, my tape-recorder switched off, that's when things got interesting. I don't think I have ever met a man so acutely and so accurately tuned in to horses.

He has six - count them - runners in the Derby this afternoon, more than all the British runners put together. Just getting six runners of Derby potential down to the post is a huge training achievement in itself. Rip Van Winkle has more than a chance, but that's not a proper Derby winner's name, so let's go for Fame And Glory instead. But there is a better name - and what better way to pick a winner? - from John Oxx's stable, ridden by the redoubtable Mick Kinane. Sea The Stars will do for me, I think. It was Oscar Wilde who said that we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. But you can't raise your eyes to anything more heavenly than a line of crack thoroughbreds on the timeless and terrifying turf.