On today’s Times podcast, Michael Atherton made a characteristically thoughtful point about the selection of Jonathan Trott, wondering whether Trott should be considered a representative of the ‘English cricket system’, from which, he essentially argued, the ‘England cricket team’ should be chosen. Trott, born in Cape Town 27 years ago and educated at Stellenbosch University, is entitled to a British passport through his father, and qualified to play for England in 2006. The selectors, Michael contended, risked turning the contest into one of ‘immigration policies’, rather than one of ‘English cricket versus Australian cricket’.

The point interested me because it is one he had to argue – that there is some ambiguity about who and/or what undergirds a national team. Is it representative of the nation, of the nation’s government, of all the nation’s cricketers, of the nation’s duly elected cricket board, of the first-class teams that participate in its domestic competition? There is no satisfactorily exact answer to this. In a bullish mood, for example, I suspect Australian cricketers would feel themselves to be representatives of their country; they are certainly fond of that hackneyed line about the Australian Test captaincy being the nation’s second-most important job. Mind you, when politics raises its ugly but familiar head, as in the matter of Zimbabwe, they also inclined to shrug their shoulders and say: ‘Shucks, we’re just a bunch of cricketers.’

CLR James saw the West Indian team of Frank Worrell as an instrument of political and racial emancipation, rather than as the cream of a ‘Caribbean cricket system’. The South African cricket team before apartheid, by contrast, represented perhaps a diametric opposite: a system that had adapted itself to the country’s vicious political realities, acting almost as an instrument of state. Since then it has been viewed, almost as controversially, as a vehicle for ratifying the advance of those previously disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

If the Ashes is, as Michael says, ‘a battle of supremacy between the English system and the Australian system’, then perhaps Trott is not an altogether inappropriate choice, insofar as English cricket has always been porous to outsiders, from Ranjitsinhji to D’Oliveira, from Murdoch to Greig; doubly so, if one notes that he is distantly related to Albert Trott, who represented Australia against England before representing England against South Africa. On the other hand, is cricket as comfortable with the flag-of-convenience sportsman as, for instance, Olympic athletics, with Merlene Ottey racing as a Slovenian after winning eight Olympic medals for Jamaica, and Kenya’s long-distance heroes Stephen Cherono and Albert Chepkurui racing as Qatar’s Saif Saaeed Shaheen and Abdullah Ahmad Hassan?

England, of course, isn’t the only Test team with this dilemma. Is Brendan Nash representative of the ‘West Indian cricket system’? His erstwhile captain Chris Gayle is apparently beholden to none but himself. Anyway, thoughts are welcomed. At the moment, events are doing the thinking for us.