Would you do it 'for your country'?

Craig Kieswetter is no doubt going to get thoroughly sick of being asked whether he feels English, even though it's the wrong question. Like me, he has one British parent and one foreign, which makes him as British by descent as I, though since his mother is a Scot and my father was English, I'm English and he isn't. He can hardly sit there at a press conference unveiling him as an England player and say he doesn't feel "English", but he ought to feel offended to have to confess to Sassenach loyalties. Robert Croft, the former England Test player, used to make a big point of not being English but Welsh – but then he had been born and raised in Wales, so nobody expected him to pretend to be English.

When someone has a choice of which nationality to adopt, in cricketing terms it makes sense to opt for British nationality: unless you can get on to the international circuit or get offered an IPL contract, county cricket is the most lucrative source of employment available. They decide to go through a qualification period not because they believe they will be selected for England more easily than for the country where they did most of their growing-up, but because it is the passport to fifteen years of being able to make a comfortable living playing cricket rather than stacking supermarket shelves.

Once they are qualified, though, it makes little sense for the England selectors to ignore them just because they were born abroad. And if it seems that too many immigrants are turning up in the England side, it's hardly the immigrants' fault that they're so good: the question, if any, is why people growing up in England don't seem to develop into top-level players, especially batsmen. It's a pretty complex question, but that most people in Britain now live in densely-populated cities with very limited space given over to playing fields, parks and so on, particularly in comparison to people-poor, land-rich Australia or South Africa, must be a major contributing factor – and there is little the ECB can do about that.

But at the bottom of the question lies an assumption that performing well in international cricket requires that a player is suffused with national pride, that unless he is utterly committed to Queen and country, he will inevitably disappoint.

This is a big assumption to make. I am sure that there are quite a few players for whom the thought of representing their country is a powerful motivator, but I doubt that it is universal among international cricketers. Enough of them talk about it being the ultimate physical and mental challenge available in the sport for it to be clear that many are most motivated by proving their excellence, whether to themselves, their peers or the press and public. Some are quite blatant about their desires to break records or be rated number one – that their team benefits from their statistical achievements is taken as read, and there is nary a mention of it being good for the country. Others just want to make their parents proud of them, and yet others want the glamour of celebrity.

I also doubt whether every callow young man even understands “representing his country” in any serious way. For quite a few, it has been a fairly overwhelming experience to suddenly find that they are not just playing a game of cricket but carrying the hopes and dreams of millions of people they have never met. Some have found that too heavy a load and have failed to perform.

What is important about a player is the fact that he is motivated to perform to the best of his ability. If nationalist fervour is what does it, fine, but questioning someone's selection simply because he doesn't wear Union Jack pyjamas to bed shows remarkably little understanding of professional sportsmen.