It's a rich man's world

The Stanford circus has never enjoyed a high reputation in the English press, so the first hint of problems has caused the vultures to descend on it before it has even died. One report went so far as to say that it was hard to see any “positives” from the venture, and that is surely going too far.

First, there’s the venue. The Stanford Cricket Ground looks to be an excellent place for watching cricket, with comfortable stands, informal grassy banks, and pavilions and other buildings which please the eye. Transplant this to Worcester, below the magnificent cathedral, or even Taunton with the old church at the corner, and you would have a perfect English county ground.

But the playing surface is not ideal. Sir Allen has made clear that he does not think much of Test cricket: this is a pity, because the pitches used so far would have been ideal for the fourth day of a Test match. Crumbling, two-paced and bouncing unpredictably, it could provide a fascinating duel as batsmen attempt to grind it out – Test cricket at one of its bests.

As a stage for Twenty20, though, this is inadequate. I don’t like slogfests much: watching a team rattle up 220 in 20 overs gets monotonous. The ideal is a game where par is about 156, nudging eight an over, but on Stanford’s pitch par seems to be about 128, or barely above a run a ball, the kind of total which does not encourage the enterprise and invention which characterises the best Twenty20 batting.

Then there’s the umpiring scheme, in which the players do not appeal but the on-field umpires and the third umpire can consult on anything, with the third umpire having a responsibility to alert the on-field umpires if they make a mistake which he can pick up on the TV. There hasn’t yet been a third umpire override, but there have been two or three decisions where the on-field umpires have asked questions of the man with the replays to check things before giving out or not out, and it has worked well to my eyes at least. I hope that Simon Taufel and the others agree and tell ICC so.

And then there has been Trinidad & Tobago, who deservedly won their (relatively) big money game against my Middlesex boys. In the spirit of Ted Dexter, whose bizarre excuses for poor English performances entertained us so much 15 or so years ago, I shall hypothesise that Middlesex were put off by T&T’s strip, which gave them the appearance of having walked through a trough of whitewash on their way out to the middle.

In truth, though, Middlesex were undone by the money.

I have argued before that prize inflation a la Stanford does not pose an existential threat to civilisation; if he wants to offer vast prizes, then I don’t see why cricketers should not play for them if they are so inclined.

But at a practical level, the size of the prize may be counter-productive in terms of spectacle. Players terrified of errors are all the more likely to commit them – and the drops in the field this week have matched anything Wall St or the FTSE have had to offer this month. The danger is that jangling nerves will mean that the winning team is the one which makes the fewer dreadful mistakes rather than the one which plays the best, that it becomes a freak show rather than a vibrant cricket spectacle.

In theory, there are ways of fixing problems with the pitch or the fear factor. What is less easy to fix is Stanford himself, who seems the sort whose main topic of conversation is how awesome he is, which makes the timing of this event unfortunate, because this month the market in awesomeness has been cornered by Barack Obama.