As your cricket correspondent, I have to report that extraordinary things are afoot. The short 'Twenty20' version of the game, begun in England in 2003 as an experiment, has proved popular worldwide, and has led to two rival leagues being established in India. New teams were created as franchises, which then had to bid against one another for the services of players from around the world. The players will be earning way more than has been normal for cricket. Meanwhile, a Texan Billionaire - Allen Stanford - who lives in the West Indies, has been investing heavily in cricket there and established his own 'Stanford 20/20' tournament. It seems he now has bigger plans - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/7365683.stm It looks like, with Stanford's financial help, a new Twenty20 league may also be set up in England, with similar amounts of money involved to those in India. I watched the longer of the two videos of him being interviewed on the above web page, and it does seem like he really means business. The real eye-catcher, though, is a series of five annual games to be played in Antigua between England and his own West Indies All-Stars team. Snappily dubbed 'Twenty20 for 20', each would be played for $20M, winner take all. $15M of that would go to the players themselves, which is over $1M each. I think I can foresee some problems with that. Imagine the competition for places in the team. Some Tonya Harding-style methods might be employed to see off rivals. And then, if you do make it into the team, the pressure of knowing that if you make a mistake that loses the game, you lose $1M+ for each of your team-mates! I wonder if two teams of 11 players could all manage to agree to chop the pot?
Hi Reachy, Glad to see you're still around. I knew he was a knight, but didn't want to obscure the issue of his Americanness. Also, although the media had been calling him 'Sir', I wondered if that was correct for a foreigner with a knighthood. However, Wikipedia informs me has dual citizenship of the U.S., plus Antigua and Barbuda, and his knighthood was awarded by the latter country, not the UK; so 'Sir' is probably correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Allen_Stanford And he definitely spells his name 'Allen' for some strange, Texan reason.
