Saturday night was a big money extravaganza. While the Indian sub continent was left largely unaware and even further unaffected by it, Twenty20 made another strong statement for cricket in a struggling part of the world.
The Stanford Twenty20 has been the subject of limelight for over four-five months ever since it was announced that Trindad and Tobago, the domestic winners, would take on Middlesex in a winner-takes-all 20 million dollar on off clash. Saturday was the day when the big clash happened and Allen Stanford has many reasons to be happy with what took place in Antigua.
That Twenty20 has taken the cricket world by storm is not an understatement. It has spawned the birth of Twenty20 leagues such as the IPL and the ICL. But Stanford has been running his own show in the Caribbean and it seems to be slowly but surely paying dividends.
To play a match that involves such huge prize money is not only difficult but also, a luxury at a time when the world over is feeling the ripples of recession in the US. While Test cricket has remained on the pedestal, there is no denying that Twenty20 is the financial arm that will also draw the greatest number of spectators, ideally or otherwise in the cricket world. It has also made the money factor even more relevant and in prominence and going by what Stanford shared with BBC, he certainly thinks it was money well spent and has even caused to opine a change of heart about Test cricket.
Take a look: “The foundation of the sport is Test cricket, the future of the game is Twenty20. Both can co-exist. Maybe one is more for the purist, maybe one is more for the younger, the ‘want to see it now, be entertained now’ crowd. You can no more do away with that which is Test cricket and replace it with Twenty20 than you can say that Test cricket is the only thing out there. [That] would be foolish because professional sport, unfortunately, is about money and Twenty20 is what is going to drive, commercially, the dollars in the door.”
He also believed money is what got the show going in the first place and is also perhaps the starting point from where cricket in the West Indies can and has been revived and what will keep sport going in the future. Twenty million dollars is a lot of money but it’s not an enormous amount of money,” he said. “It is the single biggest pay day in the history of team sports but in relative terms for what we have envisioned in this multi-billion sport it is really just an investment in the future. “It’s part of the bigger plan and that plan is to get this game into a commercially viable foothold. For it will be successful and make money and allow the West Indies to regain their rightful spot as the best in the world. You have to make investments, that makes sense today and tomorrow, this puts us on the world stage. We’ll have at least 700 million people watching this event globally on Saturday on live television, and the US$20million is what got us there.”
As far as the match itself is concerned,Middlesex faltered with all their stars in domestic hero Tyron Henderson, Malan and Murali Karthik all coming up with forgettable performances that Shaun Udal would have wished had come on another day. For Trinidad and Tobago, success could not have tasted sweeter, trouncing the favourites to win the cash prize.
Darren Ganga once again proved why the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) had also shown interest in his captaincy. It was his stablizing knock combined with an explosive one for forty-one from Denesh Damdin in a sixty-seven run partnership with Darren Bravo that sealed Middlesex’s faith on a night when it was not easy to hold on to one’s catches.
The extravaganza certainly received enough hype and attention to make this one of the must watch events in the Caribbean as well as in the UK. Now if it means greater enhancement of the game in faltering regions struggling to compete against American sports, more investments are welcome as also more of such enticing games!
