Sussex spinner Mark Davis hails from Port Elizabeth

Unless you are in the national squad, the life of a professional cricketer in South Africa is a tough one.

Salaries are low, sometimes pitiful and paid late, distances between towns are huge and crowds often below 50 a day for first class matches.

County cricket may not be a panacea, but to many talented young South Africans it is an opportunity to earn a living from the sport they love - the kind of living that would be unthinkable at home.

A couple of years could see them save enough to buy a decent home back in South Africa, not withstanding the rich cricketing experience gained.

Kevin Pietersen and Greg Smith (Notts), Mark Davis (Sussex) and Neil Carter (Warwickshire) have all made the most of British passports to spend the past season plying their trade on the county circuit.

Next year they will be followed by opening batsmen Sven Koenig (Middlesex) and Andrew Gait (Derbyshire), with wicket-keeper batsmen Gerard Brophy (Northants) and Nic Pothas almost certain to follow.

Koenig is on his way to Middlesex

Koenig and Pothas are not British, but they possess Italian and Greek passports respectively and EU nationals are hard to ignore.

Pietersen, just 21, has made it clear that he wants to play for England when he becomes eligible after fours years of residence and perhaps represents an increasingly common South African sporting story.

A highly promising all-rounder who has excelled in his first season at Notts, Pieterson saw himself as a victim of South African cricket's domestic race quotas when he made the decision to move.

"A Natal selector looked me in the eye and said 'Kevin, you're the better player, but our other spinner is coloured and he has to play. Sorry.'

"How can you hope to compete in those circumstances?" Pieterson said last year when news of his move was made public.

Several South Africans have been the beneficiaries of what the ECB call their 'overriding discretion' in being allowed to play county cricket at all.

Majola: The UCB faces a dilemma

Pothas will need more than most - he played full one-day internationals for South Africa as recently as last year.

Under the ECB's regulations, that should disqualify him entirely, but don't bet against some favourable 'discretion' from the powers that be.

And it hurts at home too.

While South Africans in England may have to shrug off the tag 'mercenary', the years of investment in local talent looks like being lost for good in some cases.

"We're obviously concerned about losing players, but we are concerned in the same way that South African rugby, teaching and medicine are concerned," United Cricket Board managing director Gerald Majola says.

"We bring people through a system here in South Africa and then we lose them to England.

"Obviously we need to look at ways of keeping people but unfortunately it's an economic reality."

By contrast, more political voices can be heard bidding good riddance.