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Some sports news

Team 1: A Samar, Mudassar Muhammad, R Pillai, D Weston, Sajid Liaqat, Asad Mohammad, Khaled Khan, Kashif Hussain, ME Latif, D Kumar.

Team 2: Afzal Virk, B Zaigham, Sadat Sidiqi, Azam Khalil, Shahzeb Choudhry, Usman Arif, Muhammad Asif, Azam Mohammad, Mohammad Naveed, Sweed Ullah, W Jalali.

Team 1 is Germany. Team 2 is Sweden. These two teams have today been contesting a game of cricket, a game truncated by the weather. Keep track of all the other games in the ICC World Cricket League Europe Region Division Two Twenty20, here.

I know what you’re thinking. “D Weston” doesn’t sound like a very German sort of name.

23 comments to Some sports news

  • I know what you’re thinking. “D Weston” doesn’t sound like a very German sort of name.

    Yup, its like you read my mind 😀

  • PeterT

    The others of course, increasingly do. I see the Swedish team had one Swede playing

  • The bigger issue is that it’s cricket. :-p

  • The Wobbly Guy

    And a lot of notable table tennis players are born in China.

    In the future, we may see athlete arbitrage – sprinters with West African ancestry, long distance runners from East Africa, caucasian swimmers, Indian cricket players, PRC table tennis players, Korean archers, white Eurasian weight lifters. Why be second rate in your own country competing against the elite when you can be first rate in another country willing to give you privileges and better treatment, and maybe a chance to beat the elites once in a while?

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    In an Australian comedy series, called The Games, that is what Australia does- lets in as immigrants people who wouldn’t otherwise get in, but are good at some obscure sport, so they are fast-tracked in time for the Sydney Olympics.

  • Chester Draws

    The others of course, increasingly do.

    Possibly, but not based on those team names. Have you seen the Hong Kong rugby team?

    You cannot assume anything from that other than people of Commonwealth heritage play rugby and people of Chinese heritage almost never do. You certainly would be wrong to assume that Hong Kong is increasingly European.

  • TWG: We already see that. There were a couple of sprinters representing Bahrain in the 100m. Jamaica’s Merlene Ottey decamped to Slovenia and represented them at the end of her career. And of course it happens all the time in football.

    Nicholas: In the Aussie movie Muriel’s Wedding, Muriel married a South African swimmer who was trying to get Aussie citizenship so he could compete in the Olympics.

  • Brian Micklethwait (London)

    I doubt the German or Swedish governments are that bothered about their national cricket teams, because cricket isn’t an Olympic sport. It may, in the T20 form that these two teams were playing, become such a sport, but it hasn’t yet. So actually, the names in these two teams do tell us something about the countries involved.

    Cricket of a grander sort has a long history of flag-of-convenience players. My favourite is that on the notorious Bodyline tour of 1932, one of England’s top batsmen was a certain Nawab of Pataudi. The Nawab’s son, also the Nawab of Pataudi, subsequently became the captain of the Indian team. The Pataudis did have quite deep English connections, though. When I was a kid at Marlborough, I think I once saw Pataudi junior play cricket for Winchester against us. He certainly did this, of that I am certain.

  • PeterT

    Possibly, but not based on those team names. Have you seen the Hong Kong rugby team?

    You cannot assume anything from that other than people of Commonwealth heritage play rugby and people of Chinese heritage almost never do. You certainly would be wrong to assume that Hong Kong is increasingly European.

    I am obviously aware of this. More importantly, none of you appear to have understood my pun. Sheesh. All a guy wants is a friendly ‘I see what you did there’.

  • Natalie Solent (Essex)

    Peter T, Ah, Sweed Ullah. I sympathise. No one got the joke in the title of this post of mine, either.

  • Rob

    Dister Weston?

  • Rob

    Dieter, but as the text is black on darkest blue not easy to spot a typo.

  • Text where? It is white on blue here. And the chap’s name is Daniel Weston.

  • Runcie Balspune

    because cricket isn’t an Olympic sport yet

    Corrected.

  • Graeme

    Wouldn’t it be nice if Moslems grasped that one of the points of having a name is to make it easier to identify yourself. A quick search on Cricinfo tells me that 20 men called Mohammad Asif, in addition to one called Asif Mohammad, have played official cricket in Pakistan in the 70 or so years of the country’s existence. It is almost as if they want to confuse people.

    Brian, Nawab Jr (alias Mansur Ali Khan) did indeed go to school at Winchester. Like his father, he attended Oxford University, however he also played a few seasons for Sussex. His father played for Worcestershire – and given the strictness of qualification rules in the 1920s, you have to wonder how this was achieved.

  • Michael Jennings

    Take a list of the countries that qualified for the last Association Football World Cup. Take the populations of all those countries. Add them up.

    Take a list of the countries that qualified for the last cricket World Cup. Take the populations of all those countries. Add them up.

    Which is the larger number? Cricket, easily. This is because there are an awful lot of people in India. If India or China were to qualify for the football World Cup, then things would change. Neither is close the qualifying for the football World Cup, however, which is extraordinary, really.

    However, in terms of numbers, it’s actually fairly easy to make the case that in terms of players and/or supporters, the world’s number one sport is cricket, not football. Certainly, daylight is third after these two sports.

    As Indians (and Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) emigrate to other countries around the world, cricket will become a significant sport in rather more countries.

  • The same is true in Korea actually. Just go there as shout out “Hello Mr. Park!”

  • Rich Rostrom

    This is not surprising. Swedes and Germans don’t play cricket. South Asian expatriates do, and there are a lot of them.

  • Mr Black

    Those teams make me rather sad actually. Our culture and identity and uniqueness is being swept away daily and replaced with… whatever unique traits the 3rd world brings. I will no doubt have a tear in my eye telling the grandkids what life used to be like before the west was just an outpost of dying cultures.

  • Rob

    “Text where? It is white on blue here.”

    Not in the text entry box (on a mobile device). Black text on a dark blue background.

  • Ah, I will see what I can do about that for mobiles!

  • Rob Fisher

    Relevant article about immigrants competing for USA in the Olympics: http://reason.com/blog/2016/08/12/us-olympic-team-includes-48-immigrants

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker!) Gray

    If the Europeon Onion were to combine all the ‘national’ teams into one European team, the medal tally would be fantastic!