KEY POINTS:
Be honest now. Who will be tuning into ESPN tomorrow morning to watch Who Wants To Be A Million Dollar Muppet?
Some people refer to it as the Stanford All Stars v England, but let's get real. The big fun will be watching who drops the catch which costs him and his chums a cool US$1 million apiece in this tatty exercise - then, in these strained economic times, which players have the gall to start gleefully cartwheeling round the ground clutching their cheque.
The last week has been an intriguing study in shifting positions. England's players - no doubt initially figuring that for pocketing seven figures they could put up with a week in Antigua with some half-baked three-hour cricket thrown in - are apparently well over the whole show now they've seen its true colours.
They have cottoned on, along with the England and Wales Cricket Board, that the end game is a personal promotional vehicle for the organiser of the US$20 million winner-takes-just-about-all game, Sir Allen Stanford.
A quick reminder: each player on the winning team gets US$1 million; the four non-selected squad members share a further US$1 million, the management split a further US$1 million, and the boards of West Indies and England divide the remaining US$7 million. The losers get zilch.
Middlesex and Trinidad & Tobago played a US$400,000 game on Wednesday, won by the Trinidadians, but the event has all the flavour of day-old pasta.
Billionaire Stanford - who owns the ground, along with the bank, the Antigua Sun newspaper and the Sticky Wicket restaurant which surround the oval, sorry Stanford Oval - has hogged the television screen during each match.
Should the England board and their players be surprised? Of course not, but they might be regretting hopping into his bed, remembering there's four more years of this palaver to come.
He's strolled the ground, beaming for his personal cameraman, plonked himself among a group of English players' partners, one pregnant wife on his lap, wandered uninvited into the English dressing room - which the players regard as sacrosanct territory - as if it is his personal fiefdom. Which in a sense it is. It's his money they're taking. What did they expect, a quiet, retiring poodle happy to hand out serious largesse in return for stuff all?
In the WAGs incident, the wives/girlfriends were apparently unsure how to react to the benefactor with the wandering hands. Should they slap him or laugh along for the cameras.
They chose the easy option. Stanford was, after all, holding a US$1 million cheque for their men in his back pocket. At least one England player admitted his first inclination was to chin the tall Texan.
The cricket's been dreadful too. More catches have gone down than in a President's Grade game. The lights are dodgy, the pitch stodgy. As England's opener Alastair Cook observed, the week is pointless without the cheque at the end. He could have gone one step further; the week is pointless. Full stop.
When Stanford helicoptered into Lord's in June trailing a trunk loaded with US$20 million behind him, England were only too happy to grease up to their new American friend. Want to bet it'll last four more years?
