The biggest spenders will feel the pinch when it comes to the crunch

As if it weren't enough that chief executive David Taylor chose a meeting at Stamford Bridge to float the idea of banning the continent's most indebted clubs from the Champions League, its president Michel Platini marked his induction into our National Football Museum's European Hall of Fame with another exocet targeted at foreign ownership of English clubs.

This is the time not to fixate on the social niceties, however, but to thank the Lord for these contributions to a debate likely to intensify in the months ahead. Few of us have mastered the complexities of the financial crisis now imbuing such once mundane acts as tuning into a news bulletin with a thrilling frisson of terror, but we can guess that the global inability to borrow money that pushed our banks to the edge of extinction will not nimbly sidestep a Premier League in hock, as FA chairman Lord Triesman revealed this week, to the tune of £3billion.

Assuming that ticket and merchandising revenues plummet as the recession starts to bite, clubs face severe cash-flow problems, and those in foreign hands may be particularly vulnerable.

If the Glazers's bankers suddenly pulled the plug, Manchester United would struggle to find replacement owners willing to take on their beastly £666m debt. If Roman Abramovich decided to sell up and build another World's Largest Yacht instead, there won't be a queue of candidates to take on Chelsea's £578m debt to him (regardless of chairman Bruce Buck's mystifying claim that this is not a debt at all, but is a form, whatever this means, of "soft equity").

Liverpool are already under severe pressure, with Messrs Hicks and Gillett owing more than £350m and unable to fund a new stadium, and although Arsenal are in the best shape,of the Big Four, their £318m debt, devolving not from splurging but the cost of the Emirates Stadium, requires a fast-flowing revenue stream to service it. If it sounds hysterical to speculate on such titans going bust, who'd have believed a week ago that the British banking system would effectively be nationalised?

Mr Taylor's proposed Champions League ban is admirable. UEFA is right to resent what it regards as cheating by English clubs, and to view it antithetical to the spirit of the game.

But inevitably there would be a long period of legal scrapping before it could be introduced, and the far more urgent question is what rescue plans the Premier League is developing to safeguard its members, if any, and how it means to ensure that they never recklessly place themselves in peril again.

The paramount issue is no longer the moral one of whether it is right for an English club to have neither an English owner nor more than a smattering of English players, but the practical one of whether those clubs will survive.

Football is not magically insulated from this scary new world. It too faces an unparalleled financial threat, whether the puppets of the Premier League who have permitted the clubs who pull their strings to mortgage their futures for quick success are the best people to oversee whatever crises lie ahead, time may tell. But this is not something on which even the City's craziest speculator would be willing to bet thruppence someone else's money.

Sri Lanka plan to get a quick fix will begin a slow death for Test cricket

Is this how Test cricket is to end, not with a bang but with a whimper?

On the day that Sir Allen Stanford's £10m Twenty20 game was reported to be on again, it was confirmed that Sri Lanka intend to tour here next spring with a second- string squad because their top players would rather play in the Indian Premier League.

The country's sports minister has asked the cricket board to release them, and permission will doubtless be granted. The ECB will no doubt protest in the strongest terms, the Sir Lankan counterpart will regretfully answer that it cannot stop its leading players enriching themselves, and a potentially engaging Test series will either be cancelled or proceed pointlessly without Muralitharan, Jayawardene, Jayasuriya and anyone else you would pay to watch.

And so the five-day game takes another step on the road to becoming this flash impostor's impoverished country cousin, to be passed the odd unwanted hand down by Twenty20 when it wants to be kind, perhaps, or patronising; but unloved and disregarded.

We're not there yet, and Test cricket's death has been exaggerated before. But there is a global cultural shift away from the languid and complex, towards the simplistic and explosive.

This is a sad moment for those of us who love this subtlest of games, and one we will look back on with regret.

Hopeful Hamilton has no excuses this time

In anticipation of Sunday's Grand Prix in Japan — the last but two of the season —Lewis Hamilton offers some historical revisionism.

"I definitely feel better than last year," says the title leader by a fragile seven points, with three races to go.

"Going into the final few races, we'd had all our energy drained away.

Cobblers. He blew last year's championship thanks not to fatigue but a sequence of errors worthy of a three-time winner of BSM's Least Talented Learner of the Year.

That was understandable given his inexperience at handling extreme pressure, but he no longer has that excuse.

All he need do to secure the title against so inconsistent a rival as Ferrari's Felipe Massa, assuming his own McLaren behaves itself, is avoid fiasco.

If not, those of us rising at 5am on the Sabbath to watch won't forgive him in a hurry.

Theo & Co must keep us smiling

The only reference you will find here to Borat, regarding tomorrow's World Cup qualifier with Kazakhstan is a plea that every public reference to him is rewarded with two weeks in Belmarsh by way of a short, sharp reminder that enough is enough.

The game itself is an interesting fixture for a foregone conclusion.

The 4-1 victory in Zagreb, inspired by Theo Walcott's hatr-trick, was magnificent,but like every precious England success it came against a team liable to be caught on the break.

Tomorrow makes the different demand that England pick holes in a massed defence, a discipline at which they have long been utterly clueless.

Victory by two or more goals is a gimme. What matters is that they make a dozen clear chances in open play.

Anything less, and the Croatian morale boost will be replaced by the usual anguished apathy.