Texan billionaire with an outsized passion for Twenty20 is pouring part of his fortune into a West Indian competitor to the Indian Premier League. Chloe Saltau flies to Antigua to meet him.
ALLEN Stanford is running roughly four hours late for an interview for which he has flown a handful of journalists to his kingdom in Antigua, where the doorknobs to The Sticky Wicket bar are shaped like cricket bats and an enormous set of stumps emblazoned with the Texan billionaire's name guard the entrance.
To fill in time, a visit to the old Antigua Recreation Ground in St John's is arranged. They don't play cricket at the ARG any more; instead, it is used for state funerals and soccer games, so the place where Viv Richards and Curtly Ambrose once ruled resembles an overgrown paddock surrounded by tumbledown stands, with a couple of rum shops still doing good business inside the gates.
The AGR hosted its last Test in 2006 and is so far removed from the tastefully decorated scene of Stanford's Twenty20 revolution that it feels like another world. Make no mistake, that world has passed into history.
Stanford shows no fondness for Test cricket and all its traditions, but he does appear to have the best interests of West Indies cricket at heart.
If the Indian Premier League is cricket's new meat-market making instant millionaires of cricketers such as Andrew Symonds, latterly of Australia but also now of Hyderabad, and teenage paceman Ishant Sharma, whose modest New Delhi family hardly knows what to do with the cash showered upon him by Kolkata. Stanford has created a Calypso competitor and is determined to make it a fixture on what is rapidly evolving into a professional, global Twenty20 circuit.
The 57-year-old started investing in the Caribbean more than two decades ago, and in Antigua owns a bank, an airline, a newspaper and, after striking a deal with the West Indies Cricket Board, the right to stage his regional Twenty20 tournament every year in return for the $140.5 million he is investing in West Indies cricket.
He makes his players look like superheroes, even if they sometimes field like grade cricketers, by equipping them with glistening black bats, pads and gloves, and is hell-bent on expansion. He recently hassled the US Government into giving him permission to do business with Havana, and while it was granted too late for Cuba to be ushered in as the 21st team in this year's regional tournament, the Cubans will have a presence in 2009.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/cricket/stanford-the-ipls-competitor/2008/02/25/1203788248401.html
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment