Not only has the team had to battle without new captain Chris Gayle and original tour captain Ramnaresh Sarwan in the life after the irreplaceable Brian Lara, but their mates back home in the Caribbean are carving up the turkey with gay abandon.
It's Stanford 20/20 Tournament time in the West Indies and that has brought a halt to the major inter island Carib Beer Series as the focus switches to Antigua for the second year of this lucrative money spinning cricket extravaganza. The catalyst for this event and the sugar daddy of West Indies cricket is Texas billionaire Sir Allen Stanford who has made Antigua his home from home in the last decade and is the biggest financial guru to hit the game since the late Kerry Packer.
Standford loves his cricket but he's no idle philanthropic and after building his own cricket stadium at Vere Bird Airport, he has since recruited virtually all the top former players onto his payroll as advisers. Officially these advisers are the administrators of the tournament but although each has been assigned to a participating team, don't expect to see the great Sir Garry Sobers, Sir Everton Weekes or Joel Garner pulling on the covers. Money talks in cricket and understandably there's been no criticism from the great superstars of yesteryear about the temporary suspension of the Carib Beer Series as they are all on the Stanford payroll full time.
The Stanford 20/20 Tournament involves teams from all over the region, some of whom don't normally participate in organized cricket but when it's all expenses paid, it's amazing who comes out of the woodwork. Even minnows like the British Virgin Islands are in Antigua for the four weeks event and they don't even have a cricket ground!
20/20 cricket is not fine dining but more of the fast-food variety although it has rekindled the imagination of the fanatical West Indian cricket public and Stanford has certainly put his wallet firmly behind the initiative with not only huge prize money but sponsorship of full time squads in various islands. His commitment to the game and his buying power has also seen most of the top West Indian media mean flock to Antigua , including none other than Tony Cozier, an outspoken critic of the minnows in the 2007 Cricket World Cup. But there appears to be no conflict of interest with minnows in West Indies cricket as Tony appears happy enough to join the gravy train and support meaningless circus cricket while the boys in South Africa take a pasting from Kallis, Smith and Pollock.
It's not hard to see why of course, and fringe test players will probably be delighted to have missed out on the South African tour if they can bag a Man of the Match award of a cool US$25,000 or a Play of the Day award of US$ 10,000! And if you don't already know, the team winning the tournament gets US$ 1 million as their prize.
It won't make West Indies cricket great again but it will pour millions of dollars into the game and somewhere there has to be a spin off. If only Sir Alan had settled in Ireland and not Antigua maybe we could all have had a slice of his action? When all's said and done the positives outweigh the negatives and in islands where poverty remains high it's still great to see this multi millionaire plough huge sums of money into his adopted sport.
Now where we can we find an Allen Stanford for Irish cricket?
Clarence Hiles
Editor
