In a shifting world, the test of a true Brit is someone who feels British, like Johanna Konta

COMMENT: There are layers of hypocrisy stamped in these belatedly awarded sporting passports

Johanna Konta was born in Australia to Hungarian parents but lived in Britain from a young age. If she says she feels British who are we to argue? (AFP/ Getty Images)

Take the following cast: Cicciolina, “Queen of Euro porn through the Eighties and Nineties” it says here, Uri Geller, Tim Howard, Johnny Weismuller, Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize winner and once of the Manhattan Project, and Don Shula, legendary coach of Miami Dolphins. The connection between the actress, spoon bender, goalkeeper, Tarzan, bombmaker and the NFL’s “winningest” coach? All are famous Hungarians, at least according to a list exhaustively, and possibly optimistically, compiled by the American Hungarian Federation.

Some of the claims might stretch even the Jack Charlton of Magyar genealogists. Martina Hingis is there as Kosice, her Slovakian hometown, was once part of Hungary. There is though no doubt over another tennis player whose recent achievements press for inclusion: Johanna Konta, the most famous Hungarian-Australian-Briton since Joe Bugner. As Hungary Today informed its readers: “Tennis player with Hungarian roots qualifies for Australian Open semi-finals.”

Hungary claims her. Australia and Britain want her. The Daily Mail lovingly branded Konta a true Brit, instructing the Aussies to get their hands off. Why a paper that has harrumphed long and loud about “Plastic Brits” should fall for Konta might puzzle some. In 2012, the year Konta became a British citizen, the Mail’s treatment of Tiffany Porter, after she refused to prove her “Britishness” by reciting the national anthem in a press conference, was equal parts shameful and ridiculous.

Konta, as we all know now but only a few did a couple of weeks ago, was born in Australia to Hungarian parents, who decided to base themselves in Britain to help support her teenaged tennis career. Porter was born in the US to a British mother. Does the Mail believe Konta more worthy of Britishness than Porter? What about Greg Rusedski? Or Chris Froome, a cycling giant comfortably accepted as a Brit despite having little real connection with the UK? Kevin Pietersen? Dylan Hartley? And how about WP Nel, the South African Scot who may well end up in a Lions shirt next year?

What will the reaction be when Nathan Hughes, the Wasps No 8, qualifies for England next summer? Hughes was born in Fiji, has a Samoan mother and played long enough in New Zealand to be available for All Black selection. Soon he will be English. This is another long list, possibly lengthier than any collection of lauded Hungarians.

There are layers of hypocrisy stamped in these belatedly awarded sporting passports and not only by the Daily Mail, the paper behind the whole Zola Budd fiasco. Who isn’t a hypocrite when it comes to sport and nationality? Everybody’s at it. For all the barbs aimed at England’s cricket team, the Aussies are well practised in welcoming other countries’ athletes into well-funded and supported teams Down Under (there’s the simple truth behind most switches of nationality). Four of Australia’s top six women were born somewhere else. The Scottish Rugby Union employs someone to trawl through South African and New Zealand players looking for fitting recruits.

Nationality and sport were once presumed to be natural bedfellows, like Burton and Taylor, Antony and Cleopatra, Major and Currie. There is an acceptance that it used to be a simpler sporting world; you played for the country where you were born and raised, the land whose blood pulsed through your veins. It was never like that. The great Alfredo Di Stefano was capped by Argentina, Colombia and Spain. And back where international football began, Scotland’s first captain was born in Canada and their first scorer in Jersey. Matt Ritchie comes from a little bit closer to Scotland, the South Coast of England. Ritchie had never set foot in his father’s country when Gordon Strachan called him up.

“You have to feel you want to be Scottish,” suggested Strachan and when Ritchie said he did that was enough for Strachan. That should be enough for all of us: the Strachan test.

Konta says she considers herself British; fine. Porter calls herself British-Nigerian-American; equally fine. Global governing bodies set the rules, and they are rules that must survive legal challenges and acknowledge the greater mobility of peoples today, like the Kontas, and then national sports must live within them. Some will take advantage of loopholes, money will play a part, but that’s life.

Otherwise the shrill claim, counter-claim, rejection and veiled prejudice of who is one of us and who isn’t, who should and who shouldn’t be allowed to wrap themselves in the flag – one of convenience or not – runs the risk of us all ushering George Orwell’s damning view up the flagpole and saluting it while singing “God Save the Queen”.

“At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare,” he wrote in his 1945 essay “The Sporting Spirit”. “But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.”