Sort powers in MySQL

We are using the ORDER BY CAST (field AS SIGNED) clause to sort the results by ‘power’ field. But it’s wrong!!

The way for sort ‘power’ it’s: ORDER BY `Power`+0

Strange… but works fine!!!

MySQL Count Distinct

I'm always (stupidly) trying to do something like "select count(distinct(country))..." when I want so see some results like...
Spain 50
France 20
Germany 10
The correct way to do it is "select country, count(*) as mycount from xxx group by country order by mycount desc"
Hopefully, now that I have this, I'll never do a search on google looking for something so obvious ;->