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No Joy in Cricketville; Mighty Texan Struck Out
By JOHN F. BURNS for the New York Times
Published: February 19, 2009
LONDON — With its banks tottering under a mountain of bad debt, many of its best-known stores shuttering their doors and joblessness soaring by tens of thousands every month, Britain has been struggling to cope with a tidal wave of bad news.
Tom Shaw/Getty Images
Robert Allen Stanford, right, with Chris Gayle, a cricketer, in Antigua in November. Mr. Stanford is charged with fraud.
Now, the blight has touched cricket, and that, for traditionalists, is an indignity too far. Worse, for those who have always regarded baseball as a vulgar derivative of the “gentlemen’s game,” as cricket has long held itself to be, the source of the game’s new woes is an American, indeed a Texan, Robert Allen Stanford, who helicoptered himself — literally — into the heart of the English game last year.
When the Securities and Exchange Commission said this week that it was investigating an $8 billion fraud in Mr. Stanford’s empire, panicked account holders began snaking round the block outside the Stanford-owned Bank of Antigua in St. John’s, capital of the Caribbean island where Mr. Stanford based his offshore operations. They shared their distress with 30,000 other investors around the world.
How cricket came to be among the Stanford casualties is a modern parable. For 250 years from its origins in modern form in the 18th century, it was a sport many Englishmen saw as an expression of all that was best in their culture — gentlemanly, unhurried, best played and watched on languorous summer afternoons and, above all, unsullied by the commercialization that was remaking other sports.
But in an age of live television coverage and mass-market tastes, the times were running against the traditionalists, and pressures for change built up as grandstands stood mostly empty for all but the biggest games — and largely empty even for the latter stages of international matches known as tests that dragged on for five days, often ending in a draw. Not surprisingly, cricket’s top players remained relative paupers in a world with sporting megastars.
Last year, though, a new Indian cricket league had a wildly successful debut season, featuring the best players in the world in so-called 20/20 contests shortened to the length of a baseball game. The best players were rewarded with salaries rising to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
England’s best players were banned from playing in the Indian league, because its schedule conflicted with the spring start of the English cricket season. As top English players threatened revolt, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the game’s governing body, struck a five-year, $100 million deal with Mr. Stanford to mount an annual carnival of 20/20 games, in Antigua and England, that would be an effective rival to the Indian series.
The deal struck a jarring chord from the moment last June when Mr. Stanford flew on his helicopter into Lord’s cricket ground in London, the most hallowed in all of cricket, with what he said was $20 million in $100 bills sealed in a clear plastic box. The money, he said, was the prize fund for the winner-take-all contest in Antigua.
The series, played in November, was a “sinkhole,” “shemozzle” and a “shame,” according to Britain’s leading cricket writers. The England team, favored to win, was thrashed in the final by a team of West Indian players known as the Stanford All Stars.
Mr. Stanford himself was dismissed as “crass” and “vulgar,” after admitting he knew little about cricket, and disparaging the long-form game, the five-day international tests, as boring. Worst of all, perhaps, the Texan was accused of flirting with the wives and girlfriends of England’s players.
In the wake of the fraud charges against Mr. Stanford, the cricket world, in England and the West Indies at least, has been deeply shaken.
Five West Indian players on the team that won in November are said to have reinvested their $1 million earnings with the Stanford empire. Cricket in England has been left with a budget shortfall of about $20 million, and some of the 18 county teams that are the bedrock of the English game are saying they will repay, out of a sense of shame, the $70,000 payments received from the series in Antigua.
Emboldened traditionalists have demanded that the game, at least metaphorically, burn Mr. Stanford in effigy, and rediscover its old values and rhythms. Michael Henderson, in The Daily Telegraph, caught the mood as well as any when he wrote that cricket “attracts good people,” “reveals human character” like no other sport and respects “time-honored rituals.”
“Maybe cricket, as we have known it for so long,” he concluded, “is not cut out for the modern commercial world. It loses so much in translation.”
By JOHN F. BURNS for the New York Times
Published: February 19, 2009
LONDON — With its banks tottering under a mountain of bad debt, many of its best-known stores shuttering their doors and joblessness soaring by tens of thousands every month, Britain has been struggling to cope with a tidal wave of bad news.
Tom Shaw/Getty ImagesRobert Allen Stanford, right, with Chris Gayle, a cricketer, in Antigua in November. Mr. Stanford is charged with fraud.
Now, the blight has touched cricket, and that, for traditionalists, is an indignity too far. Worse, for those who have always regarded baseball as a vulgar derivative of the “gentlemen’s game,” as cricket has long held itself to be, the source of the game’s new woes is an American, indeed a Texan, Robert Allen Stanford, who helicoptered himself — literally — into the heart of the English game last year.
When the Securities and Exchange Commission said this week that it was investigating an $8 billion fraud in Mr. Stanford’s empire, panicked account holders began snaking round the block outside the Stanford-owned Bank of Antigua in St. John’s, capital of the Caribbean island where Mr. Stanford based his offshore operations. They shared their distress with 30,000 other investors around the world.
How cricket came to be among the Stanford casualties is a modern parable. For 250 years from its origins in modern form in the 18th century, it was a sport many Englishmen saw as an expression of all that was best in their culture — gentlemanly, unhurried, best played and watched on languorous summer afternoons and, above all, unsullied by the commercialization that was remaking other sports.
But in an age of live television coverage and mass-market tastes, the times were running against the traditionalists, and pressures for change built up as grandstands stood mostly empty for all but the biggest games — and largely empty even for the latter stages of international matches known as tests that dragged on for five days, often ending in a draw. Not surprisingly, cricket’s top players remained relative paupers in a world with sporting megastars.
Last year, though, a new Indian cricket league had a wildly successful debut season, featuring the best players in the world in so-called 20/20 contests shortened to the length of a baseball game. The best players were rewarded with salaries rising to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
England’s best players were banned from playing in the Indian league, because its schedule conflicted with the spring start of the English cricket season. As top English players threatened revolt, the England and Wales Cricket Board, the game’s governing body, struck a five-year, $100 million deal with Mr. Stanford to mount an annual carnival of 20/20 games, in Antigua and England, that would be an effective rival to the Indian series.
The deal struck a jarring chord from the moment last June when Mr. Stanford flew on his helicopter into Lord’s cricket ground in London, the most hallowed in all of cricket, with what he said was $20 million in $100 bills sealed in a clear plastic box. The money, he said, was the prize fund for the winner-take-all contest in Antigua.
The series, played in November, was a “sinkhole,” “shemozzle” and a “shame,” according to Britain’s leading cricket writers. The England team, favored to win, was thrashed in the final by a team of West Indian players known as the Stanford All Stars.
Mr. Stanford himself was dismissed as “crass” and “vulgar,” after admitting he knew little about cricket, and disparaging the long-form game, the five-day international tests, as boring. Worst of all, perhaps, the Texan was accused of flirting with the wives and girlfriends of England’s players.
In the wake of the fraud charges against Mr. Stanford, the cricket world, in England and the West Indies at least, has been deeply shaken.
Five West Indian players on the team that won in November are said to have reinvested their $1 million earnings with the Stanford empire. Cricket in England has been left with a budget shortfall of about $20 million, and some of the 18 county teams that are the bedrock of the English game are saying they will repay, out of a sense of shame, the $70,000 payments received from the series in Antigua.
Emboldened traditionalists have demanded that the game, at least metaphorically, burn Mr. Stanford in effigy, and rediscover its old values and rhythms. Michael Henderson, in The Daily Telegraph, caught the mood as well as any when he wrote that cricket “attracts good people,” “reveals human character” like no other sport and respects “time-honored rituals.”
“Maybe cricket, as we have known it for so long,” he concluded, “is not cut out for the modern commercial world. It loses so much in translation.”
