Stanford Calamity? Only for Antigua, not for cricket

There’s some good stuff in Michael Henderson’s column on the so-called Stanford debacle* today, even if he indulges himself with a rather rosy,soft-focus view of cricket’s past. The ideal of the village green bathed in evening sunlight with the vicar standing as umpire and children playing by the boundary and all that is a powerful, enduring image for sure but this English arcadia is only one thread running through the game’s history. A history that has been tougher, more scandalous and, often, meaner, than Henderson’s cosy view would have one believe. That’s to say, the sport’s history is well-stocked with cads and frauds and bounders and Allen Stanford is but the latest of them.

Still, Henderson concludes:

However it is run, though, cricket deserves a better fate than betrayal by those who seek to represent it. True lovers of the game felt diminished by Stanford’s arrival, and the lowering of his flag will not have lightened their load.