Eight months later ...
This weeks’ cricket coverage has been dominated by stories about Sir Alan Stanford, often accompanied by pictures of his big day out at Lord’s last June when he and his new best friends at the ECB and WICB unveiled their brave new world
Martin Williamson
25-Feb-2013
And who's that lurking behind Stanford ... • Getty Images
This weeks’ cricket coverage has been dominated by stories about Sir Alan Stanford, often accompanied by pictures of his big day out at Lord’s last June when he and his new best friends at the ECB and WICB unveiled their brave new world. Standing among them were two other knights, Sir Viv Richards and Sir Ian Botham.
Eight months on and it’s all ended in tears. The media has savaged the boards for their involvement with Stanford and not scratching under the dollar-plated surface of his financial empire. While Richards has been quiet, not so Sir Ian.
“The sorry Stanford debacle leaves English cricket with nothing but egg on its face,” he fumed in his column in the Mirror “It has been a disaster for the Antiguan people, a disaster for West Indian cricket and a disaster for English cricket - and you cannot just let something as massive as this be swept under the carpet. Someone has to be accountable. [Clarke] was the one telling everyone Stanford was the way to go - and it has been a huge mess.
"They took the Stanford deal instead and now where are we? It is all well and good suggesting it was a collective board decision, but I seem to remember Clarke pushing very hard for it."
Martin Williamson is executive editor of ESPNcricinfo and managing editor of ESPN Digital Media in Europe, the Middle East and Africa