Stanford Super Series

Giles Clarke – an unfair but fairly amusing comparison of two pictures

Charged with massive fraud involving $8bn investment scheme

Alleged to have bowled a deliberate no-ball

The England and Wales Cricket Board’s business partners

Here’s one:

No-one with a moustache could ever be evil.

Allen Stanford can be found through the simple method of conspicuously dropping some change

You probably saw yesterday that Mexican authorities had a mooch around one of Stanford’s private planes. There were some cheques in there which were allegedly related to the Gulf cartel, Mexico’s most violent gang. Now the media are hinting that Allen Stanford is involved in money laundering.

As we said the other day: Millonaires, billionaires? They’ve all done something wrong. When money is that big a priority – which you can safely assume it is with millionaires and billionaires – their priorities are warped and inhuman.

If you were run over in a public car park and the only person there to help you was a billionaire, they’d walk straight past you and check the ticket machine to see if there was a quid in the tray where the change comes out.

If you were dying of thirst in the Gobi desert and a billonaire was there with a bottle of water, they’d charge you a quid for it.

If you had a heart attack while returning your trolley at the supermarket and there was only a billonaire to help you, they’d step on you and take your trolley back to claim the quid.

In short, if there’s a quid in the area, that’s all a billionaire will think about. They love pound coins.

Sir Allen Stanford charged with fraud

It’s funny when billionaires get told off.

It was good that Sir Allen Stanford inadvertently instilled a sense of responsibility into the West Indies team through encouraging them to prepare properly for the cashtastic Super Series, but it’s also good that he’s being charged with fraud, because he’s a billionaire and billionaires have always done something wrong.

We don’t know what he’s done exactly, but on the grounds of his ludicrous wealth alone, we feel that he deserves it. Whatever ‘it’ might be.

Sir Allen Stanford disbands his ‘legends’

In more brand ambassador news, Sir Allen Stanford has done away with his team of ‘legends’ that he used to promote his shamtastic cricket event.

A spokesperson said:

“He has disbanded the legends group, but at this stage no decision has been taken on the future of the Super Series.”

It is rumoured that the Stanford Legends have been replaced by the Stanford Journeymen – Viv Richards, Sir Garfield Sobers, Sir Everton Weekes et al. making way for Mervyn Dillon, Omari Banks and Tino Best.

Sir Allen Stanford can expect brand identity and recall to be severely compromised by this move.

Stanford 20/20 VIP party

We were given VIP tickets to a Stanford party at The Living Room in Manchester. We had to wear shoes instead of trainers. Having to wear shoes instead of trainers tends to mean a venue is ‘not our sort of place’.

The evening revolved around showing the match on the big screen. There were to be free cocktails, canapés and ‘special guests’.

When we arrived, we were handed our free cocktail. It was orange coloured and had straws in it. ‘What is it?’ asked our companion. ‘It’s a cocktail’ replied the girl.

Now fully informed about our beverages, we made our way through to the main room. All the other VIPs were probably reclining in their chaise longues already.

There seemed to be a lot of standing up going on.

Standing up didn’t make us feel like a VIP. If we’d been watching the match at home we would have had the choice between standing up or sitting down and we would have opted for sitting down.

There were some tables down the sides of the room. One table only had two people sitting at it, so we asked if we could also sit there. The two people said yes, because you just have to in those situations.

Sitting down was better than standing up, although our companion was facing away from the screen. This is what the seating was like:

None of those people are us, although we do like his socks.

The cocktail was very sweet. Even a girl said it was sweet and girls will drink syrup given half a chance. We went to the bar to get a beer.

Here is the beer standing next to one of the cocktails:

The beer was called ‘Sol’ and it was one of those beers that has to have fruit stuffed into it so that you can’t taste how disgusting it is.

Later on we found a bar serving Foster’s. Foster’s was the best drink available. Here is a really blurry picture of a man enjoying his Foster’s:

During the innings break, we saw the first special guest. It was Lancashire’s new captain, Glen Chapple. Glen said England were ‘under a bit of pressure’.

The two people at our table were Paul and Dave. Dave had entered a competition to win the VIP tickets on Lancashire’s website. He won, “so I felt like I had to go”. He said he probably wouldn’t have watched the match otherwise. Paul and Dave were probably the most into the match out of everyone there.

The picture on the big screen had been expanded so that the score was constantly off the bottom. Fortunately, England played poorly enough that you didn’t need to see the score to know how badly they were doing.

After the match, there was a second special guest. We were possibly the only person in the room who was delighted that it was Oliver Newby.

Oliver Newby didn’t disappoint. Reviewing the match, he said that he was ‘partial to a bit of Chris Gayle spanking’. Nobody else seemed to know that Oliver Newby’s sense of humour revolves around making himself sound like a sexual deviant. Either that or they weren’t really listening.

During the Stanford Superstars’ innings there was jerk chicken and some pastie-type things. Both were very nice indeed.

Stanford Super Series match reports

The world of cricket seems to be working itself into a state of rare fervour about the Stanford 20/20 for $20million thing. Cricket’s dead, they say. All plant and animal life too. Probably.

We’ve been quite reassured by it all. If absolutely EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD hates it and thinks it a horrendous event worth boycotting, maybe the sport’s not doomed.

Anyway, being as everyone does seem to be avoiding or ignoring the big match itself, we thought it was ripe fodder for match reportage. We’re doing something for the match and we’ll produce a report, but we thought it might be good to see how you all experienced the grand moment as well. It could be the greatest groundswell of apathy ever seen on a cricket website.

Who knows, if we get enough reports, they might even last until April when we’ll all be able to avoid the cricket in person again.

Send your reports to the usual address and remember – we can’t state this clearly enough – do not, under any circumstances, mention the actual cricket.

Stanford Twenty20 prize and trophy

How much do you care that this match is for $20million? Would you care ten times as much if it were 20/20 for $200 million?

No. Would you balls.

So how could Sir Allen Stanford possibly pique your interest? What prize might get you interested in the outcome of this match? He wants you to be interested. He can’t buy history or prestige, so what could everyone’s favourite wife-fondling, moustachioed Texan billionaire do to get you up for the match?

Our feeling has always been that the prize is irrelevant, but having given it more thought, we reckon we could engineer a situation where we would care.

The tactic is simple. There should be some sort of trophy that the winning players would wave around with triumphant looks on their faces – only the trophy would make them look like idiots. We’d care who won that.

Obviously, the players would have to care sufficiently to wave said trophy like they meant it, so maybe they could still win $20million and the trophy could be a sort of physical representation of that fiscal prize. It wouldn’t have to literally embody it by being a big dollar sign or anything. As long as the players knew they had to wave it and that waving it meant they’d won all the money, that’d do.

Our favourite idea for the $20million trophy so far is just a big blackboard that says “I’m a knobhead” on it.

We hasten to add that we think the players are innocents in all of this – fortuitous innocents, but innocents nonetheless. Regardless of that fact, we’d still care who ended up waving an “I’m a knobhead” sign.

Thanks to Ceci for the above image.

Stanford 20/20 – what happens if there’s rain?

It’s a shame the Stanford 20/20 for 20 match is floodlit, because a match of this financial magnitude being abandoned because of bad light would be too gloriously hilarious for words.

There could be rain delays though and we wouldn’t bet against it. At times cricket can seem wilfully offended by any kind of grand occasion and can usually be relied upon to supply scenes of high farce at the crucial moment.

See the denouement of the 2005 Ashes, when Australia’s batsmen came out to bat in poor light when everyone already knew England had won.

See the World Cup final when Australia and Sri Lanka needlessly retook the field when in fact the match had already been decided.

See the 2007 English Twenty20 Cup final, when no-one realised Kent had won, because they did so off a no-ball.

Build it up as much as you like, Mr Stanford, but the simple fact is that your $20million match will probably be decided by a wide in a rain-revised run-chase.

Stanford 20/20 gimmicks

It was only a matter of time before they introduce BIGGER and therefore BETTER balls.

But the Miami Vice style attire? That’s a step too far.