Allen Stanford - The Man Who Bought Cricket

In 2008 a black helicopter landed on Lord’s cricket ground, an area of grass usually referred to as “hallowed turf”. Out of it stepped Allen Stanford, a big, brash American. To say this was unusual is an understatement. It wasn’t just the helicopter, but also that someone who wasn’t a member of Lord’s was permitted to put a toe upon the holy green stuff. “Trying to get into Lord’s is difficult enough,” remembers Nasser Hussain, former England captain. “As captain, I couldn’t walk through the Long Room to take a look at the pitch.”

No such restrictions for Stanford. After being warmly greeted by the bigwigs of the England and Wales Cricket Board, he made his way inside the building to a large Perspex box. There, the assembled media took his photograph, as he grinned alongside Ian Botham, Viv Richards and the ECB chaps. The box was front and centre, because inside the box, in neat piles of $50 bills, was $20m.

The money wasn’t (just) a gimmick. It was a prize. Stanford was funding a one-off cricket match in the Caribbean between England and his own handpicked West Indian team, the Stanford Superstars. The winning team would take the entire contents of the box. “And if you lose?” asked a reporter. “Nothing, absolutely nothing,” said Stanford. Unbelievably, the ECB was up for this. “We were just furious,” recalls Jonathan Agnew, the BBC’s cricketing correspondent. “It’s not cricket, it’s everything that cricket isn’t.”