Stanford puts his spin on cricket

One way of avoiding all the tricky consequences of your cricket team winning 11 million dollars is to play so badly that the result is never in doubt. Judging by the disquiet emerging from the England camp in the build-up to the match, their 10-wicket thrashing by the Stanford Superstars in Saturday's Twenty20 clash in Antigua, where the members of the winning XI got their hands on a million dollars each, almost came as something of a relief. The winner-takes-all nature of the match sparked fears, not least among England's players' association, about the potentially damaging effect on squad morale of dropping a catch which didn't just lose the game but cost your team-mates a life changing sum of money. And then there was the question of what it meant for the England cricket team to be playing in a match where the only point at stake was not victory over an old rival but the cash on offer. England captain Kevin Pietersen was certainly well aware of the public relations disaster looming if England, were they to win, rejoiced too much in their own good fortune for so, relatively, little effort. "There is no way in the world I want people to carry on like a clown, because there are a lot more things happening in the world that we want to respect," he said before last weekend's clash. That sense of unease came to the fore in Antigua where Stanford was forced to apologise after being pictured with Emily Prior, the pregnant wife of England wicket-keeper Matt, sitting on his knee. He also had to say sorry for his habit, established during his backing of the domestic Twenty20 event he'd set up in the West Indies, of walking into team dressing rooms. But given the matches were being played at his ground for his money, the implied criticisms of Stanford's conduct seemed, well, a bit rich. The Stanford series was a way for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to forestall the exit of leading players for lucrative engagements in the Indian Premier League Twenty20 competition, whose dates clash with the start of the English domestic and international season. As it is, England's players didn't become instant millionaires, a result likely to encourage the IPL in its pursuit of Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff. Many cricket officials, in common with other sports administrators, regard the United States as a great untapped market despite, for example, the failure of football to a major mark in a country where homegrown sports dominate. "There have been many attempts to penetrate that but right now getting television interest in the US market is extremely difficult," said ECB chairman Giles Clarke. "Sir Allen succeeded in getting this tournament covered on ESPN2 which it had not previously been on before. It has the potential for 90 million viewers." Irish playwright Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as someone "who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." By allowing the England team to be hired out to Stanford, the ECB may have established an unfortunate precedent which limits their room for manoeuvre in future talks regarding scheduling and fixture congestion. Longtime Antigua resident Stanford's oft-stated aim has been to restore the standing of West Indies cricket to its glory days of the 1970s and 80s. "We're doing it, the results are here tonight. We will beat anybody in the world with this team. We are back, we're going to take the world again," Stanford, not a man for understatement, said after Saturday's match. According to stereotype, English players are supposed to be hard-bitten pros and West Indians 'calypso cricketers.' Yet it was then men from the Caribbean who showed a ruthless streak to earn the kind of money which, for them, truly was a life-changing sum given the inability of West Indian economies to generate the financial rewards for players more readily available in England. "I am a human being and these guys are fellow professionals - quite a few of them are a lot less privileged than I am - and to see them so happy was wonderful," said Pietersen. "To see a guy (batsman Andre Fletcher) fall over in front of me at the end of the game, crying, with a million dollars in his bank account, was absolutely fantastic." So this was either the most nakely commercial exercise imaginable or a near-charitable undertaking. It either 'was' or 'wasn't' cricket. Explaining cricket to an American, or anyone who hasn't grown up with the sport, can be difficult. Working out what Stanford's involvement means for cricket could prove an even tougher task for those running the game.