Barking up the wrong tree
Nitin Sundar
25-Feb-2013
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As the South Africa- born Craig Kieswetter pads up for England, Mike Selvey notes in Guardian that fretting over the country's foreign-born players, is but a means of ignoring the ills inherent to the domestic system.
South African cricketers do not just come in and storm the castle. Geoff Miller and his selectors choose them for no reason other than that in their opinion they are the best players qualified. Were there home-grown players who could prove themselves better, they will get selected instead. So where are they? Specifically where are the batsmen? What is on trial is not the ambition of mercenary cricketers but the system in this country that identifies talent early enough but then fails to advance batsmen of promise from representative age-group cricket through the system.
Nitin Sundar is a sub-editor at ESPNcricinfo