Stanford's a clown and his circus is going to kill cricket

The closer it gets, the more vulgar the whole Stanford experience is becoming. Sir Allen Stanford himself, a Texan who obtained his knighthood after taking Antiguan citizenship and effectively buying up the island, is a businessman of genius but, away from the day job, he's a self-obsessed buffoon.

Watching him messing about with the WAGs suggests a man consumed by his own ego, who thinks he can write his own rules. He has also become careless about important details, like playing this $20million winner-takes-all extravaganza on a pitch that offers some chance of high scoring and under lights built high enough to permit professional fielding. Stanford's self-esteem may well be dented by a volley of adverse criticism come Sunday.

At least I hope so because I've become nostalgic for the old cricket and am getting a sense of what we are on the verge of losing if the Test game makes way on a regular basis for this sort of crude circus.

Proper cricket looks set to gurgle down the plughole of history and if it happens the old farts at Lord's will only have themselves to blame.

They are the custodians of the game's sacred flame but have let it gutter by repeated failures to offer clear leadership to a paralysed International Cricket Council, who have repeatedly failed to tackle important moral issues like Robert Mugabe and corrupt players. It's now obvious the growth of Twenty20 leagues threatens the entire fabric of Test cricket. Instead of trying to breathe fresh life into Tests by, for instance, cutting down on disruptions to play caused by bad light decisions, the England and Wales Cricket Board have said "me, too" to the Twenty20 phenomenon.

Every decision that has come out of Lord's in recent years has gone wrong. Dividing the County Championship into two leagues has done nothing to revive interest in the county game. 

The decision to limit overseas players hasn't produced a new generation of outstanding English cricketers but has left the county game still dominated by ageing timeservers who are going through the motions.

There's a price to pay for this failure of will and the grinning face of Allen Stanford suggests it will be a high one. The ECB have made their Faustian bargain with him and the wages of sin could irrevocably change the face of cricket as we knew it forever.

Premier League's international stars are helping ours to shine

No surprise perhaps that the FIFPro world team of the year contained five Premier League players but it should be quite a shock to the knockers that three of the five are English — Terry, Ferdinand and Gerrard.

In past decades three Englishmen were never likely to feature together in a properly chosen world team.

The conclusion has to be that today's Premier League, involving as it does so many of the worlds best players, has really honed the skills of England's finest, even if it has also meant the exclusion of all those local journeyman who used to dominate the old Division One to nobody's benefit.

Meanwhile, Mystic Mellor has dumped his crystal balls in the dustbin after making such a hash of the Liverpool match. 

I really thought Chelsea would win two- or three-nil but the reality was rather different, courtesy of a fluky deflected goal by Liverpool and a failure by Chelsea to convert pressure into serious shots on target.

Only in ice dance do you get points for artistic impression, as Chelsea now know to their cost.
Liverpool, to be fair, were very well organised and could be preparing to make a serious bid to win a competition that, in previous years under Benitez, they have been only too happy to bow out of before Christmas.

Form is temporary, class is forever. And which Liverpool have will soon become apparent.

Good luck Harry, you'll need it

You have to hand it to Harry Redknapp, he's certainly a football man for all seasons. Into his seventh decade, he's still up there, clinging on in the Premier League and good luck to him. With Daniel Levy on his case, he'll need it.

Levy's camp insists the Redknapp deal was done in the last few days. However, I suspect it gestated in Levy's mind longer than that and, whilst the chairman was offering Ramos his support, it was actually the support the rope gives to the hanged man. When Levy says he's right behind you, you know it's between your shoulder blades he's looking.

Methinks Harry will need to be on his game even more than usual to contrive a happy ending here.
As for Levy, Harry is his sixth manager in seven years. Levy's making quite a career out of laying down his friends for his life.

Will it ever dawn on him that he could be the main problem at White Hart Lane?

Tennis teens still worry me

Reader Tom Inskip has taken me up on my point about Laura Robson being, at 14, too young for adult women's tennis. He points out that both Williams's started at 14 and women players develop quicker. He says the WTA restrict 15-year-olds to 10 tournaments a year, 16-year-olds to 13 and so on. He also says nine of the last 12 junior Wimbledon winners, though hardly household names, have made it into the top 100.

Tom is at his least convincing in arguing that the players I mentioned did not burn out. Andrea Jaeger retired at 22, while Tracy Austin was effectively finished by the time she was 21 and Martina Hingis first retired at 22 — three years after claiming her final Grand Slam victory.

On a happier note, Tom thinks Laura will be a top-20 player by the time she is 20 and I hope he's right. However, I continue to think she would have a longer, better career if she kept out of the big league until she was 18 and her physique fully formed.

Apply brakes to F1 scheme

If it ain't broke, don't fix it is too straight-forward a strategy for the FIA. Formula One is more open at the moment than it has been for years, with no single constructors dominant, yet the FIA want to throw the whole sport up in the air by standardising engines. Sheer idiocy and Ferrari are surely right to say that if that comes in, they head out.