Allen Stanford - Twenty/20 Revolutionary Or The Death Of Cricket As We Know It?

Good day all you budding sports reporters, and may I extend a warm hello to what appears to be an entirely American football/Manchester United "soccer" fans domain of 'top writers.'

Needless to say, many on this site may not care about cricket. But the Twenty/20 revolution has bought with it mega money, firstly by bringing in record crowds for the domestic English Twenty/20, then with the IPL and ICL setting up their own franchises complete with huge wages ranging between $50 thousand dollars to $1 million dollars. For sure, most top class English players will be playing in the IPL next year, as only Dimi Mascarenhas did very briefly this year. Kevin Pietersen, Ravi Bopara, Ian Bell, Luke Wright, Owais Shah, Ryan Sidebottom, Graeme Swann, Matt Prior - the list is endless for English players to enhance the capitalists favoured form.

Indeed, any ODI/Twenty20 specialists will be showing off their reverse switch hitting, slog sweeps into the crowd for six, cow corner mows, and scoops over fine leg. The downside to this is the Test hardened techniques of key English batsmen Michael Vaughan and Alastair Cook will be rendered completely undesirable. Just see how Dravid and Kallis fared in this years competition for proof of batting requirements. Twenty/20 affords no dots for a batsman. You go to the crease, you have little time to get in, and then, you must push on, hitting boundaries and sixes at will.

If you perish, it seemingly does not matter. Great. Cricket has now become a watered down game like Baseball. Hit out or get out - instinct over skill. Or is it instinct combined with specialist skill?

Maybe that would be better to put it that way. Twenty/20 requires specialist skill. It's all very good damning the game, criticising its harsh format, punishing on bowlers as it is a lottery for batsmen. In fact, I began to believe it was a lottery all round, until watching Shane Warne marshal his troops to victory in the recent IPL. The revelation of Shaun Marsh proves that at the top of the order, it is important to play proper cricket shots played with a little more power. A little more dynamism. Gilchrist and Jayasuriya have also stuck to a similar motto throughout the years of pioneering the openers job in ODI cricket: good cricket shots allied with timing and power.

Oh, and a little elevation (a bit like U2 in your ear on the I-pod).

So then, Mr. Stanford, as we all know, has far too much money. He wants a West Indies select X11 to play England in a one-off Twenty/20. If England win, each player will win a cool $1 million dollars each. Not bad for 3 hours work. Which equates to 4 overs if you bowl. About 10 overs max of batting if you bat, but usually, maybe only 5 overs if you're lucky. 

My concerns are as follows: who selects the team? Will there be any bribes awarded to selectors? What will this do for morale within the England squad? And how will this affect Test Cricket wages, which for five days of gruelling work, is a thousand times demanding both mentally and physically?

I fear Test Cricket will suffer. Players will be lured by big bucks, and will not need to worry if their Test form does not measure up to ODI/Twenty20 form. Stanford the sugar daddy could instigate the death of 'proper' Test cricket.

I also want to know something else. How do we get Chanderpaul out?