KEY POINTS:
There is little more distasteful than a professional sport selling itself to the highest bidder. Come in, Texas billionaire Sir Allen Stanford and the US$20m Twenty20 Stanford Super Series cricket.
Yes, folks - this is the unedifying sight of a cricket match played solely for money. The winning team stand to win US$1m each, with a further $2m split between the rest of the squad and coaches. The West Indies and England and Wales cricket boards will share a further $7m.
The match between England and the Stanford Superstars (Who? Essentially the West Indies team) will be played in Antigua on November 1. It has the distinction of not being worth anything, other than money.
No tradition. No honour. No trophy. No kudos. No competitiveness save that of money-hungry cricketers and cricket boards duelling it out for who gets the fattest wallet.
It has no sporting value. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Actually, a lot of zeroes - seven of them and all for a game of cricket.
Let's not even get into the ethics of getting a million googoos for playing cricket. That'd bring out the loonies in Internet-land who find it distasteful a journalist should quibble at sportspeople taking the money.
Good luck to the players, I say. If I was an England cricketer (or a NZ one for that matter), I'd be there in an orderly queue with my hand out, too. But I'd also be exposed to the charge I was what Winston Churchill referred to when he embarked on his famously sharp exchange with Labour MP Bessie Braddock.
Churchill asked Braddock if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. She said she would. He asked if she'd do it for five pounds.
"Winston," said Braddock, "what do you take me for?"
"Madam," came the reply, "we have already established what you are - now we are just negotiating the price."
The real villain here is the England Cricket Board which put its players up for rent in the face of the Indian ICL and IPL Twenty20 threats. Although it blocked its players from those leagues, it then had to find lots of money to stop said players from deciding money was more important than cricket - and hiving off to play in the IPL.
Enter Stanford. Some months ago, the man who built a global business out of a wealth management company, rocked up at Lord's in a helicopter with a transparent plastic case containing US$20m in cash.
It was a big box. There was lots of money inside and photographs were taken of Stanford smiling at all his money like the cat that shat in the Queen's porridge and bit one of the corgis.
He was surrounded by cricket heavies who looked honoured to be close to that much money and a little anxious too - almost like they were worried they'd break down and start smooching the top of the case as Scrooge McDuck used to do in his bank vault in Duckburg where he used to dive off a springboard into his money to bathe in his wealth (Kids: ask your parents... ).
You get the feeling, don't you, that I find this about as tasteful as someone sicking up a kebab in your car. This isn't sport, it's international financial willy-waving of the highest order - right up there with the America's Cup.
Those pesky Indians have lots of TV money so they start buying control of the world game. The bounders. Imagine upsetting decades of white rule. So the ECB and friends resort to prostitut... er, playing a nonsense game for unimaginable amounts of money.
Of course, the predictable has happened - predictable when the focus is money rather than sport. As the Stanford Super Series is being played in the West Indies (who admittedly need the cash and stand to earn US$3.5 million), a sponsor squabble erupted.
Digicel, the official West Indies sponsor, were understandably squiffy about Stanford coming in and went all litigious about their US$20 million sponsorship of West Indies cricket. Digicel are a communications company headed by Irish entrepreneur Dennis O'Brien, reputedly another who has to carry his ego round in a wheelbarrow.
So off everyone popped to the High Court where the ruling was that the West Indies were wrong to sanction the match.
That would be that, you might think. But Stanford blew his bugle like the cavalry riding to the rescue - and he and O'Brien commenced negotiations and decided what they should have before the whole sick thing ever got to court. But does anyone care?
Even rescuing the West Indies from penury offers little comfort as their cricket administrators have shown such astonishing ineptitude that disaster may only have been delayed, not diverted.
There is a case that Twenty20 will secure the future of cricket. It could do so by bringing in new money and new audiences, thus maintaining the future of the game's best version - test cricket - but the one least patronised by crowds and sponsors.
Just as Kerry Packer's World Series of Cricket sat cricket on its ear decades ago, so could Twenty20. But even in Packer's day the "circus", as it was known, actually provided moments of sporting note with the finest cricketers of the day.
It could be even worse than watching money lust masquerading as sport. We could be watching the Black Caps.
