Plenty Twenty - you can't buy a contest

The Stanford ‘clash’ promised to be car-crash cricket. What we got was England reversing into a wall.

The macabre fascination of watching players under million-dollar pressure was supposed to provide enough excitement to usher in a new era. But this 20/20 ‘showpiece’ has done nothing for the shorter game, and will drain from the American consciousness with barely a whimper.

Sitting in a pub where cricket rarely ventures, a few of punters revealed to me that they “hate cricket, but this 20 million game sounds actually quite interesting”. And then the cricket started.

On a lifeless pitch, unresponsive to any cash-injection, England, visibly top heavy with batsmen, donated their wickets away with carefree abandon - perhaps they weren’t so concerned about the dosh after all. The All-Stars played with a discipline and focus that too often eludes the West Indies, proving that the basics of training hard (and not wandering aimlessly across your stumps) remain essential whatever the contest. When Gayle launched his final boundary, it was genuinely warming to see the money go to the team who both deserved and needed it most.

Andre Fletcher’s measured interview would have pleased Kevin Pietersen, whose concerns that such huge loot in times of recession could damage his sides image proved premature.

What it all means for the wider sport remains unclear. That cricket becomes a tantalising prospect for kids growing up in the Caribbean is a fantastic legacy of this first game, but whether the ECB can hold its players back from the IPL now seems unlikely. They too, it seems were planning prematurely.

There was no million-dollar moment, no nail-biting finish, no intrigue - macabre or otherwise, at all. For the All Stars young side, it was a life changing night, for England it was utterly forgettable cricket.

Stanford 20/20 For $20m, but not for me

SkyBet instructed me, every two minutes when I watched the tennis last night, that sport, apparently “matters more when there’s money on it”.

That is the pillar on which the entire Stanford “ Twenty/20 for 20 ” farce is built upon. In a match bereft of any meaning, it’s hoped that injecting it with vast sums of cash will create some excitement. As Simon Barnes noted: this is not sport, this is a crass (un)reality show.

For most of the millions of people who were possessed by the Wimbledon final this year, or that series in 2005, money was never a factor. Perhaps those were heady days. Now, in this absurd era of $20m matches and credit crunches, maybe our perspective cannot go further than our wallets. But when King Kev launched his frantic, chancey and breathtaking counter-attack after lunch on day five at the Oval, I doubt many were enthralled by the potential financial benefits. Great sport has a value system that translates into no other.

This afternoon, the England selectors (for which read KP) announce the 15 people that are to be hired out to a Texan billionaire. For some of those this will be a life changing, bank breaking moment. For the rest of us, the ‘match’ couldn’t matter less.