The curtain comes down on a difficult international season for the Springboks at Ellis Park on Saturday. In 2005 the Boks won three of their four Tri-Nations encounters and could actually claim to have had a better competition than in 2004, when they won it. This time around, though, Jake White’s team has been relegated to the ”also-rans” column.

”Politics is a shitty world,” opined Andriy Shevchenko last weekend. ”I want to stay well away from it.” In which case, I can’t help feeling the vaguest misgivings about his choice of club. If anything is clear about recent developments in English football — and not an awful lot is — it is that the Premiership appears to have made the cheering step up from football league to geopolitical pawn.

John Terry had already declined to talk about the sudden explosion of acrimony surrounding the departure of William Gallas — ”I’ll answer those questions back at Chelsea,” he said — when his response to an entirely different enquiry during his press conference in Skopje this week gave an insight into the latest rumpus involving his club.

Michael Schumacher confirmed this week that he will make a statement about his future after Sunday’s Italian grand prix at Monza. The 37-year-old German driver could announce an end to his illustrious career, which has produced an all-time record 89 grand prix wins to date.