It’s an ill-wind that fails to blow in any silver-lined clouds and the current financial difficulties are no exception. It seems that Sir Allen Stanford, the Texan financier determined to “crack” the American “market” with Twenty20 cricket may be in a spot of bother himself. I’m going to guess that having people suggest you could be a kind of Caribbean Bernie Madoff is, even if completely untrue, not Good News.
It wasn’t the money involved in the Stanford Twenty20 challenge match between his all-stars and England that was objectionable. After all, there’s a long history of big-money challenge matches and cricket’s known worse rogues than Stanford in the past. True, the event was pretty vulgar stuff but that’s not really the issue either. No, by hopping into bed with Stanford the ECB made a mockery of their oft-professed desire to insist that test cricket remains the pinnacle of the game. Yet here they were partnering a man who loathes “proper” cricket and sees Twenty20 as the future of the game.
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