Air of Inevitability

For anyone who has regularly seen Craig Kieswetter play for Somerset over the last few years (and I have), his promotion to the England one-day squad had an air of inevitability about it. With Matt Prior's failure to make the most of his opportunities with the bat in the over-limit game, I suspect it won't be long before Kieswetter is in the starting eleven, and, once he's there, he may take a lot of shifting. The Test side will probably take longer, but that, surely, will come.

Kieswetter, for as much as he's become a crowd favourite at Taunton, is South African. Not someone who happened to be born there but learned his cricket in England (like Prior himself, or Andrew Strauss), just South African. With a Scottish mother, but South African.

Regardless of England's seasoned history of playing players with South African backgrounds, it's hard not to feel a pang of discomfort as a third player with a history of junior cricket in that country makes his way into the current team.

But what can be done? I seem to remember Geoff Miller muttering something about possible future problems last summer, but the only way round it would seem to be a decision on the part of the selectors not to select the best player for a particular position if he'd learned his cricket elsewhere. And that's hard to envisage.

No, we'll just have to rely on county cricket producing more players of the required standard. And that (for a range of reasons that could probably fill an entire blog) is pretty hard to envisage too.

Good luck, Craig.