Yeah I think Yorkshire were the one county that held on to this rule. I remember it being a thing when I was a kid.
I am therefore eligible to play for Yorkshire, I just choose not to because cricket is boring
Just checked, apparently it was 1991 they abandoned their “unwritten rule” (it seems like everyone else decided you can play for your county of birth OR residence for two years in the 1800s)
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Quite something that Tendulkar was their first non-Yorkshire born player.
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I mean, if you’re going to break a century-old unwritten rule, you might as well go all out
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Except I didn’t say that at all, I said individuals above nationalities, don’t put words in my mouth
Apparently in tennis, in both the ATP and WTA, players from the UK play registered as British, regardless of whether they’re English, Northern Irish, Scottish, or Welsh. I’m not commenting on whether this is right or wrong just the way tennis deals with the nationality of players. Don’t know how this got turned round into negating people’s identity but I have never said that
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Jersey and Guernsey have never been direct feeders to England - Le Saux and Le Tiss chose England. They were eligible to be considered for any of the UK nations or France.
As someone with a Channel Islander partner, I can confirm that they would definitely consider folk to be ‘At It’ with the common assumption that the self-governing Channel Islands are simply an extension of England, like The Island Of White or similar 
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Fair enough, I have taken my knowledge of it from looking at these things as a kid and did assume that England was the default for the Channel Islands in these instances, my mistake and happy to be corrected
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Nationalities are always going to be restrictive to some people and identity is a fluid concept. If you move to a country as a child and all your experiences and socialising is there but you don’t have a piece of paper does that invalidate your sense of identity or experiences?
Virtually all of my experiences are in Northamptonshire, this is where I grew up and the places and people I know. I don’t really relate to big cities and would find it hard to adapt to living in London or Manchester for example. Same country nominally, different experience.
At some point you have to accept that nations are an imperfect and imprecise way of categorising people based on a set of shared cultural norms that they may or may not identify with.
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You’re a tennis fan, aren’t you Bam?
What about Greg Rusedski? Born in Canada and was originally a Canadian National - Polish / Ukranian father, English mother, changed nationalities to British in 1995 and became higher in his countries rankings as a result - UK number one, until Henman came along
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Well, I don’t really watch tennis so much as play it for fun tbh. Good for him though, stuff like this shows that nationality doesn’t have to be a rigid thing
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I don’t think Bergerac helped really as a kid. I too just assumed they were part of the UK fully as it always just seemed like the UK on that show
The islands have never been part of The UK or, conveniently, The EU. There’s still an anti-British sentiment in the islands as people that lived through the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945 feel that they were abandoned by the UK for strategic reasons.
There’s a Guernsey based poster on here who could probably represent this much better than a non-islander like myself, but they are primarily a lurker so I’m not going to @ them…
Yeah I mean I found out later for sure.
Australia pushed for independence in a similar way IIRC because the UK was very much, “Send us all your boys to fight in Europe! What’s that, Japan might invade? Guess you’re stuffed then.” We were dead good at being fucking wankers to allies in that war.
No idea what’s been going on here but eligibility nis basically anything and including what happened to you, your parents and your grandparents, from my understanding, so for instance, if I was a professional footballer, I could choose between England, Scotland Italy (grandparent) and Singapore (as my mother was born there).
Basically as @Bamnan quite rightly says, as time goes on national identity is an increasingly fluid thing in a more “globalised” world. Take the current Swiss and Austrian team for instance which is largely made up of refugees from the Yugoslavian war, players who are from across the former Yugoslav states but choose Switzerland or Austria because that’s where they grew up and is “home”, the Turkish players who chose Germany, or almost the entire current French team (basically everyone except Greizemann) have some sort of African heritage thanks to colonialism (so also applies to England, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Spain, basically all the western European colonial super powers).
While not really getting this is a wee bit at it, I also sympathise as the the U.K being the weird little rainy fascist island it is is dreadfully predominantly White British. For all the fear mongering that Brexit or the 80s skins or the rivers of blood speech etc ethnic minorities still only make up around 15% of the country and almost all of them are in larger urban areas (predominantly London, then Birmingham and Manchester, Leeds-Bradford) so well over half of the country (maybe even 2/3rds) has basically no interaction with anyone other than other White British and occasionally Irish people.
As mixed England and Scottish (and therefore ultimately British, though I preferred European) it’s very amusing the amount of times have to justify why I support Scotland not England, and when Scotland are inevitably knocked out I default to Germany because I lived there and I want some investment in a team that could actually win, but England fans are so obsessed. Like what’s it to anyone else who I support? It doesn’t matter?. I have my reasons for not liking the England national team and the furore and noise that accompanies it every single time. I hope my England supporting friends have a nice time but there’s just so many idiots out there, and while this absolutely exists within Scotland too, it is nowhere near the same scale and/or comes from.a.less privileged place.
I’ve kinda lost the point of what I’m saying here but yeah be who you want to be
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interesting to remember that Germany as a nation is relatively modern, wasn’t it separate states that were conquered by Bavaria or something in the 19th century? That’s not really a long time for a national identity to form is it
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Prussia, yeah. And then East and West post war too. As Germany is a federation it’s a bit like America in that each state has its own laws and regulations
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Is there a lot of sense of local identity between the states there and resentment at being mislabelled?
There isn’t a word for UKish is there? So no easy way to say in the same way as British, Scottish etc. Have to say ‘UK national’?
In the thread Andy Murray was raised.
A bit of chat about how he considered himself Scottish more than British came about, you made a comment on it that it couldn’t be the case as he’s an individual.
So I asked you can an individual not be Scottish?
You said no.
I actually agree that nationality can be fluid and people can identify as whatever nationality they like.
This was why I was surprised when you clarified that Andy Murray, an individual, couldn’t be Scottish. After in the thread it had just been discussed that was how he identified.
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