What price national identity?

The Africa Cup of Nations has produced its usual balance of flair, poor goalkeeping and bizarre spectator costumes but what it does produce in fewer quantities with each passing tournament is naivety. It's not that long ago that watching the competition was akin to watching a group of children playing with a balloon in a wind tunnel with the balloon being pulled on a string by some unseen hand. These days that's much less of that, partly due to better pitches, better coaches and better players, all the good African players are playing in Europe at a level higher than they could possibly attain at 'home', there are some exceptions to this, Libya for instance only have one player who plays outside of Libya, but they are few and far between.

Anyway Equatorial Guinea are one of the co-hosts for this years competition, along with Gabon, and their squad is proving to be one of the talking points. Out of the twenty three man squad twenty one of them weren't born in the country and are claiming EQ nationality through descent, most of the players concerned are Spanish, the country was after all once part of Spain's tiny but beautifully formed African colonial past. The team that played Senegal didn't actually contain a single player born in the country. Now I don't begrudge a country for exploiting the rules nor do I begrudge any player who discovers that he has the right to represent any country through descent but you do have to worry about the country's footballing future when it relies so heavily on outside help.