It’s good to see English sport doing what it does best: poaching foreign sportsmen. And today we have another foreign superstar in Keaton Jennings, who until a couple of years ago, played for South African’s Under 19 cricket team on the not unreasonable grounds that he is South African. Now he has decided to be English.
Cricket, though not solely cricket, has always done this but with club cricket in decline and international cricketers being confined to boys from private schools, the process has been accelerated. It brings you back to that thorny old problem: what defines nationality?
I have a surname that comes from Norway and a middle name from the Netherlands so I suppose I should fear post Brexit life, but at least I was born in England. It’s where I have always lived. Less than 50% of my bloodline is English, but birth trumps all. If I had been any good at sport, I would only have played for England, and why? Because Norway and the Netherlands represent my ancestry, my heritage, but not my nationality.
I cannot understand, for the life of me, why anyone would play for a country that isn’t theirs. What kind of passion can raised by being someone you are not? Plainly it’s no issue for Keaton Jennings or countless numbers who came before him. Greig (who I adored, by the way), Lamb, Trott, Dernbach and Pietersen are among a legion of Commonwealth waifs and strays who came to play for England, not one of whom, I would suggest, did so because they believed themselves to be English. Get real.
Rugby is much the same, some say worse, with South Sea islanders playing for England, Wales and anyone else who will have them, especially New Zealand. Wales still draws upon the sons of Englishmen, so does Scotland. What does the national anthem mean to those with passports of convenience? The Welsh anthem, for all its stirring emotions, does nothing for me. (To be fair, neither does God Save The Queen, but that’s because it’s a crap anthem.)
Jennings scored a century on debut, good for him. He broke no rules, he used the ones that were there. Ahead lies a lucrative career, one which will be achieved by his undoubtedly ability but specifically because of a decision to play sport for another country.
I am the internationalist who believes in the honour of representing your own country, not someone else’s. My heritage is not my nationality. I don’t understand how anyone else’s could be, except that I do.
I mentioned Jennings as potential superstar, but that will never be true so long as his sport is confined to satellite TV. He will just be a successful name, just like Joe Root, never transcending his sport, as the likes of Botham and Flintoff did before.
But even if he does become a superstar, he’ll be the superstar from the Transvaal who chose to play for England, not the English superstar.
