Foreign-born players at the ICC World Cup

Anthropology experts after having carefully examined and analysed hundreds of doctoral dissertations have concluded that there are two types of people in this world. One, who love cricketing trivia, and the other, who don't.

If you are a cricketing trivia buff, you will relish this with glee. However, if you belong to the second category of people, please do me a favour before you proceed further : Please keep all hard and easy to fling objects away from you, I repeat, please keep all hard and easy to fling objects away from you, as you might just be tempted to throw the flower pot or something of the sort on my nose (with glee?) for making your day a little more miserable!

Here we go...

The ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 is underway. Among the 16 teams in the tournament, there are 5 who have qualified by virtue of their performance in the qualification tournament, the ICC Trophy.

Interestingly, a majority of the cricketers in associate and affiliate countries, the ones that need to qualify, are expatriates from or born in Test playing countries.

Here is a list of all the countries at this year's tournament with the players in their ranks who were born in a country, other than the one they are representing at the moment.

Canada has 12 players -> Geoff Barnett in New Zealand, Umar Bhatti & Qaiser Ali in Pakistan, Anderson Cummins & George Codrington in Barbados, Ashish Bagai & Ashif Mulla in India, Sunil Dhaniram & Abdool Samad in Guyana Desmond Chumney in St Kitts, Austin Codrington in Jamaica, and Henry Osinde in Uganda.

The Netherlands has 8 players -> Billy Stelling, Ryan ten Doeschate & Eric Szwarczynski in South Africa, Adeel Raja & Mohammad Kashif in Pakistan, Peter Borren & Darron Reekers in New Zealand and Alexei Kervezee in Namibia.

Scotland has 5 players -> Ryan Watson in Zimbabwe, Paul Hoffmann & Glenn Rogers in Australia, Fraser Watts in England and Dewald Nel in South Africa.

Ireland has 4 players -> Trent Johnston, Dave Langford-Smith & Jeremy Bray in Australia, and Andre Botha in South Africa.

England has 4 players -> Kevin Pieterson and Andrew Strauss in South Africa, Jamie Dalrymple in Kenya, and Ed Joyce in Ireland

Kenya has 2 players -> Rajesh Bhudia and Tanmay Mishra in India

New Zealand has 1 player -> Scott Styris in Australia

Australia has 1 player -> Andrew Symonds in England

Bermuda has 1 player -> Saleem Mukuddem in South Africa

India, Pakistan, West Indies, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Zimbabwe have no foreign born players within their ranks.

Information all taken from good old Cricinfo Incase you are wondering who the hell is Cricinfo, he is another cricket buff, but much worse than me!

Now was that not enlightening information!

Its time to rush and vanish at a speed faster than the time it takes for you to get to that flower pot!