Shane Warne the acknowledged master of leg spin, petrol head, ‘fluid tablet’ imbiber and serial philanderer (allegedly) is apparently investigating whether he qualifies for a German passport so he can play county cricket in England as a non-overseas player.
County sides are currently allowed to have two overseas players at present, but that will be reduced to one next summer. However players holding European Union passports do not count towards the quota.
Warne explained to BBC Sport that "My Mum was German. She came over to Australia when she was, I think, four or five," adding that because of the rule change an application to obtain a German Passport was something that they were looking at. If Warne were able to obtain dual nationality, it would enable Hampshire to look elsewhere for someone to fill their overseas vacancy.
Warne's South African team-mate Nic Pothas also currently qualifies through Greek ancestry and New Zealander Hamish Marshall is playing for Gloucestershire on an Irish passport.
This set me wondering whether Germany actually has any kind of Cricketing establishment at the moment. The idea of a cricketing German just seemed a little odd. However to my surprise and delight they do. In fact last month they actually spent a week in Manchester preparing for next years World League Div 5 tournament which is to be held on Jersey.
The German Squad for the training week was named as;
Graham Sommer (Captain)
James Eggleston
Srinivas Satyanarayana (wicket-keeper)
Alamgir Mehmood
Shahid Nadeem
Vaseekaran Aritharan
Asif Khan
Javed Iqbal
Ehsan Latif
Imran Khan (??!!?)
Zaheer Ahmed
Rajiv Vohra
Philip Brown
Surya Narayanan
Jakob Bumke
With all of the squad sounding as solidly Volkish as does our dear Shane I’m sure that he’ll have no problems persuading the Federal Authorities of his claim.
I think I may adopt them as my second Cricket team and save up for a jaunt to Jersey. In relative terms they can’t be any worse then England right now and will certainly have a novelty factor.
Deutschland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt!
Hell why not!!
4 comments:
Hardly seems worth it, he can't have more than 2 seasons left in his, fat old aussie git. Just a publicity stunt if you ask me. He hates it when no-one is writing about him.
I'm obviously confused I thought he had retired. Was that only from the Australian side?
Steve - You’re probably right
JMB – You’re correct in you assumption. Warne has retired from playing international cricket but continues for his current English County side Hampshire where I believe his contract runs until the end of 2008.
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