Wednesday, July 11, 2007

He who pays the piper...

I've previously posted here about Allen Stanford and the monumental financial commitment he's making to grassroots cricket in West Indies - £50 million pounds over the next three years.

There's a further development outlined here. He wants to run a week long 20/20 tournament in Antigua next June involving four nations (Australia, South Africa, India & Sri Lanka) with the winners playing a West Indies All Stars 20/20 side, drawn from the best players in the (now) annual Stanford 20/20 competition.

It'll be interesting to see how the ICC react to this. The last time the cricket authorities came up against a determined individual prepared to sink a lot of money into the game they were left with egg all over their faces. Presumably they'll want to avoid the same fate again, so maybe they should be looking at ways of encouraging Stanford into the cricketing fold, rather than treating him as some pesky external irritant.

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