Nightmare that's helping the ECB achieve dream of making cricket more like football

Matthew Norman
19 Feb 2009

Whether he is another Bernie Madoff will be for a US court to determine but Sir Allen Stanford appears to have made off with something else that wasn't strictly his to take.

He has purloined the reputation of English cricket but perhaps this is unfair. For one thing, it's not clear that there was much reputation left after the Kevin Pietersen captaincy debacle.

For another, the man to blame for this hugely enjoyable farce isn't Stanford but England and Wales Cricket Board chairman Giles Clarke, the genius who flogged the game to this Texan Dr Faust.

On no account must Clarke be allowed to resign. Far better that he is forced to remain in his post, watching footage of the Stanford chopper landing at Lord's on a never-ending loop and listening to the county chairmen screaming "Where's our Stanford Twenty20 money?" down the phone. Let him remain as a source of undying contempt and an object lesson to all that the soul of a sport is worth more than a quick buck.

Clarke will assure us that the ECB took every precaution before signing up to the unimaginably fiascoid Stanford Cup in Antigua, where terrified investors spent yesterday trying in vain to withdraw their cash while England's cricketers engaged in the fuddy-duddy discipline of Test cricket.

It's a far cry from the Wham Bam Thank Y'All Ma'am version with which Sir Allen seduced Clarke, although anyone facing the prospect of a 450-year stretch in a state penitentiary might care to consider the time-killing merits of the five-day game.

How Clarke and his colleagues failed to sniff out the danger from an egomaniacal exhibitionist who might as well have had "HazCon" tattooed on his forehead in flaming red letters is not the question. Maybe some did but chose to ignore the smell for fear of unearthing something so rancid that the deal would have to be abandoned.

Their idea of "due diligence", you assume, was as fearless and incisive a financial investigation as the one which persuaded the Premier League of Thaksin Shinawatra's fitness to own Manchester City.

Anyone in newspapers knows the temptation to turn a blind eye to stories so fantastic that you're terrified to check them out lest they unravel. But experience teaches us to make the call, because the risk of longer-term disaster far outweighs the lure of short-term glory.

This story is pretty good itself and certainly a hoot but it's an old one all the same. It's the familiar tale of English sporting administrators - so much the world's worst that Sporting Maladministration should be at least a demonstration event at London 2012 - being apparently thick, self-serving, incompetent and so avaricious that they will always sacrifice the spirit of their game, which is the thing they're nominally employed to protect, on the altar of dodgy cash.

It has long been the ECB's cherished wish (hence the foolish fixation with thrill-a-minute Twenty20) to transform cricket into something more like football. This may not be exactly how he dreamed it but thanks to Clarke that ambition is closer to realisation today than ever before.