The Trott factor in English cricket

Barney Ronay, in his blog in the Guardian, rates a Jonathan Trott-inspired England win only marginally better than a defeat. Trott’s South-African origin, Ronay says, doesn't make him easily acceptable as one among the English fold.

Trott does seem likable and adept and – again, jarringly – not in any sense embarrassing. The problem rests with the notion that England have to pick him because he's the best available player. This is a basic misunderstanding of what international cricket is about. International cricket isn't about winning. It's about the occasionally upsetting tectonic collision of regimes, a cold war of talent-buffing schools and development empires. If Trott wasn't around we might be watching Ian Bell flinch his way to a disappointing 37 so fluently contradictory in its elegant stodginess, so swaggeringly meek, that it makes you want to jab yourself in the eye with a steel kebab skewer.