Sir Allen Stanford, billionaire financier and philanthropist, the Texan from Antigua-Barbados is in the midst of negotiating a new three-year deal with the England and Wales Cricket Board (EC) for an annual quadrangular tournament at Lord’s featuring his Stanford Superstars XI. Stanford created and funded the Stanford 20/20 cricket tournament in the West Indies reports Cricket360.com in this cricket special report.

In June 2008 Stanford and the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) signed a deal for five Twenty20 internationals between England and a West Indies all-star XI with a total prize fund of £12.270m (US $20 million) to be awarded to the team that wins the Championship. This was to be largest prize money ever to be offered to a single team for an event.

Now however Stanford will reportedly not be staging his jackpot match this year, but is now negotiating the new three-year deal with the ECB. Reportedly this new contract will replace the existing multi million five-year deal he signed with the board in June 2008.

Though the negotiations are on with the ECB the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA) that represents the English Players, wants to wait until the English tour of the West Indies tour is over to finalise matters. “It is imperative we get to the bottom of what the benefits are to English cricket and we would like longer to look at the deal than we had last time,” said Sean Morris, the chief executive of the PCA. “We are in friendly negotiations with the ECB and we will take it to the players at the appropriate time. At the moment they are fully focused on the Test series and we do not want to distract them from that.”

It would appear that like pretty much everyone else, the billionaire is also feeling the pinch of the global slowdown and is chary of plunking down the fat fee as prize money for the tournament. There is also the fact of the conflict about sponsorship between Digicel and the West Indian cricket board which was never completely resolved.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the ongoing negotiations which will be relevant to the Twenty20 game as it evolves. Cricket360 will be keeping a watch.

Comments

Add New RSS

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

Newer news items:

Older news items: