And a quick nurdle for the ton...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/7657046.stm

Aggers will be pleased. He's been dead set against the match from the start (I'm none too keen, either).

No doubt money will talk fairly quickly, though.

It's going to depend in part on the degree to which Stanford has already sold the "exposure" that Digicell wants to others, though (and to the extent such contracts are binding and/or expensive to terminate).

I don't think that there is anyone on here who wants West Indies cricket to return to a place of prominence than I do, but Stanford really does come off as a twat.

Absolutely. His commercial expertise doesn't look very impressive on this form.

It's great to hear Christopher has a bowler's mentality. I took up bowling (despite my seigneural background at the school out of If...) because it seemed like no-one else wanted to do it. But delighted I did. So much more decisive to take a wicket than anything a batter can do in one stroke.

Except perhaps Michael Slater's first ball in the 1994/5 Ashes.

Yeah, Stanford warrants a bit of David Conn treatment, I reckon. Yet much of the coverage of him and his silly project has been sycophantic "Ooh! An American who likes cricket! With money! Helping out the poor grateful peasants of the Caribbean! What a character he must be!"

"Twat" has it about right I'd say, ursus.

I'm not sure how much commercial expertise he actually has.

His father made a pile buying up real estate in and around Houston after the oil-related crash of the early 80s and then selling it at huge profit a few years later when the market had recovered. His son has "built" that fortune by "managing" rich people's money in a period when the financial markets have largely been a one way bet. I would be quite interested to see how his funds have done in the current turmoil.

There's some likelihood my brother will have come across him in Houston in that period. I'll ask him. Though he and I are very different, I usually trust his judgements of who is commercially smart and who isn't.