ECB's imperial attitude has left English cricket in the cold

The Observer's chief sports writer, Kevin Mitchell, believes that the fear of a power shift towards India led the ECB to embrace Sir Allen Stanford. While the controversy surrounding the Texan's fraud charges wages on, Mitchell says that at the heart of the troubles lay the ECB attitude to India. Where other countries embraced the new big noise in the game, England balked.

The Sunday Times' Martin Johnson feels the ECB's disastrous flirtation with Stanford is having repercussions on the pitch.

There is still some way to go before cricket can hope to match football for greed and dishonesty, but it’s getting there. Graver issues are afoot than a fraudulent appeal for a catch, but it’s all part of the wider philosophy – so shamelessly embraced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) – of the end justifying the means. Otherwise, why, on the final day of the gripping Antigua Test match, did the England wicketkeeper triumphantly claim a catch, when the gap between ball and bat would have accommodated an Eddie Stobart lorry?

Simon Wilde, in the same newspaper, writes that the ECB bosses were seduced by Stanford's cash and took their eye off the ball.

Clarke and Collier may have been insufficiently mindful of the image of a game that is peculiarly wrapped up in morals. Football can be mired in as many financial scandals as it likes; cricket cannot. Stanford was simply too risky a venture. That should have been clear from the outset.

In the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley says it is a disgrace that the ECB is passing the buck.

Nick Cohen writes in the Observer that the on-field drama in Antigua couldn't hope to match the exposure of Stanford's rotten regime.