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Terry Butcher (member of Ingerland national team 1980-90) was born in Singapore. Owen Hargreaves (member of the Ingerland national team 2001-08) was born in Calgary, played in the Wales (not Ingerland) under 19's team, and was based for most of his career in Germany. There's also the odd case of Michael Owen, who was actually born in England... but only because Chester is the local maternity hospital to his native Flintshire (Wales), where he lives to this day. There have been other cases over the years. But who cares if they're obviously white?

Of course the whole debate that this nasty subdebate has spun off from is based on a complete misunderstanding of why the England cricket team is now very good (as opposed to the 1990s when it was a joke). There's this idea that England turned the corner by poaching players from overseas (Kevin Pietersen, who hails from Pietermaritzburg, being the particularly obvious case). But players born outside Britain have always featured in England cricket teams, particular as batsmen: Douglas Jardine was born in Bombay, Ted Dexter was born in Milan, Tony Greig was born in Queenstown, and Allan Lamb was born in Langebaanweg (both in South Africa). And this was as true of the period of awfulness (Lamb included, but also, say, Graeme Hick of Salisbury, Rhodesia) as any other. What turned the England cricket team around was a transformation of coaching practices at both an elite and grassroots level, an understanding that the latter needed to be taken extremely seriously (and never reduced to a platitude) and the prioritisation of the national side ahead of the County teams. It is, for example, no longer the case that the first shot learned by a would-be batsman is the forward defensive.

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