Hired soldiers on the battle front

Having missed out on claiming Klose’s talents for themselves the Poles dug a little deeper to come up with an unlikely hero – Nigerian-born Emmanuel Olisadebe.

Nicknamed ’Czarnecki’ – a Polish surname but Czarny means black in Polish – the Panathinaikos striker fast-tracked to Polish citizenship by President Aleksander Kwasniewski carries his new nation’s hopes into their Group D campaign.

“Oli” isn’t the only African to have headed out East.

Ghana-born Gerald Asamoah was another debutant scorer for Germany and now dreams of partnering Klose as the three-times world champions start to look ominously good.

Then there’s Patrick Vieira, a world champion with France but whose adopted country crashed to the one of his birth, Senegal, in the opening match of the tournament.

Arsenal star Vieira is in good company with multi-ethnic France, whose skipper Marcel Desailly would once have been playing alongside Asamoh with Ghana while midfielder Claude Makelele hails from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Until only recently immigrants to Germany, Turkish “guest workers” in particular, used to complain about the near impossibility of having the fatherland bestow citizenship upon them.

So it seems ironic that German-born Leverkusen midfielder Yildiray Basturk has opted to play for Turkey, the country of his origins.

With competition ultra-hard to break into Brazil’s star-studded squad, Alessandro Santos decided to head a little further east than Olisadebe and Asamoah.

He moved to Japan.

Now, seven years after taking up residence, he has chance with the land of the rising sun having put him in their squad.

Ireland are, as ever, thankful to their usual strong contingent of English-born players – but England themselves have also got in on the act, selecting Canadian-born Owen Hargreaves – who plays his club football with Bayern Munich and towards whom the Germans also cast envious eyes.

FIFA regulations merely require a player to hold a valid passport for the country concerned and not to have represented another nation before they are free to pull on the shirt of their new home.