Scotland play in the National Cricket League Division 2 with some of the English counties and are called the Scottish Saltires in that competiton. A Saltire is the name of the Scottish flag by the way. Like the English counties they are allowed to play two overseas players but only in this league and the English one day knock out competition. The player profiles refer to the Scottish Saltires and include these players. Please don't jump to conclusions too quickly.
All the rest of the side play Scottish club cricket and play for Scotland between their work committments. They are not paid full time professional cricketers.
This is only their second year in the league. Last year they were lucky to have Dravid playing for 12 out of 18 games. They also had a South African Jon Kent who has played provincial cricket in South Africa and was playing as a professional in Scottish club cricket.
This year they had Sriram, of India A, for a limited number of games before he was picked for an India A tour. Yasir Arafat, who has played a few games for Pakistan A, has also played since he is also a club pro. Another club pro, a West Indian Reifer, replaced Arafat while he was training with Pakistan. However the team has played the last few games only with Arafat because the coach wants to give more experience to Scotland qualified players and because it saves money for the national cricket organisation. They are cash strapped after all.
As for Gavin Hamilton he is now playing for Durham County and has had a terrible year with injury. There is another Scot at Durham, Kyle Coetzer who is the brother of the Coetzer named in the squad. John Blain is playing for Yorkshire and Dougie Brown (also a former England player) plays for Warwickshirewho are hopefully to be the county champions. However none of these are available for the Bangladesh games since the counties, not surprisingly, will not let them play. But they sometimes do become available. It's like the Irish, they have 5/6 players in county cricket only one of whom played against you. Ed Joyce of Middlesex is Irish and is trying to qualify for England. As a result both teams suffer from not being able to put out their strongest sides. However that's cricketing life for us!
Edited on, August 31, 2004, 6:02 PM GMT, by Trueblue.
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