Twenty20 / Frank Gregan / 03 November 2008 / Leave a comment

Frank Gregan looks back at a bad week for English Twenty20 cricket that included plenty of moaning and an even greater amount of disastrous cricket.

Unusually for me, not one drop of alcohol touched my lips on Saturday night as I endured the X Factor racking up enough brownie points with the Missus to be able to watch the Stanford Challenge live during peak time Saturday night viewing. I don't go much for the talent show thing, but I'd have done anything to get to watch the cricket match that I had spent six weeks looking forward to.

I went without the booze so as to be sure to stay awake but in retrospect I wish I had slept right through the game! In fact I would have rather watched a medley called Strictly Come X Pop Idol Get Me Out of Here instead of the garbage that England dished up.

Kevin Pietersen said during his post match interview, "there are some fantastic players in that dressing room," which had me screaming into my TV set, "Give me a bottle of what he's been drinking!"

The England team did nothing but moan for the entire week about everything from the state of the pitch to the unrestricted access given to the man whose dollars were making it all happen. If you sell your soul to the devil you can't start complaining about how hot it is in hell!

The worst whinge was in relation to the event's sponsor hitting on the WAGS. Come on get real, that is about as insecure as it gets. These guys are international sporting heroes, athletes in the prime of their lives and they're worried about the old lady running off with a bloke who is nearly sixty! OK, so he's a Texan Billionaire, owns a fleet of yachts, has his own air force and proved that he can buy English cricket with a flick of his cheque book... but at the end of the day he was just being hospitable!

England's problem throughout the week was that they were in denial. They were there as cricketing lap dancers, they were taking part in something that was tacky but the reward meant it was impossible to refuse the invitation.

Instead of embracing the occasion and being open about it they continued to treat it as an inconvenient stopover en route to India. And of course success would have meant a million dollars which they kept telling everybody was neither here nor there, they were only there to play cricket. Their arrogance was staggering.

Anyone who doubted whether the money mattered to the Englishmen only had to watch the first over by Harmison during which each delivery was met with a ringing endorsement by every fielder geeing up the English quickie, willing him to produce the miracle which would swell their bank accounts. The voices were louder than I have ever heard on a cricket pitch and there was also an air of desperation, a realisation that they had got it all wrong and that they had no divine right to the prize.

Conversely, the West Indians (called the Stanford All Stars for the week) were loving it and had embraced the event, the money, the environment and the wicket with a steely professional determination that ensured that they not only won but they embarrassed the visitors. Chris Gayle and Co must be rubbing their hands together in anticipation with a further four of these annual matches already agreed.

They must be delighted that the opposition is England and not Australia, South Africa or Sri Lanka. Let's face it, the way the English played on Saturday Gayle's men would probably rather face England than Mexico, Kazakhstan or the Isle of Man!

If Sir Allen Stanford really wanted to make it a pressure game then he should have introduced the winner stays on rule similar to that is employed in small games around the country. If England wanted to come back then they should have needed to win or else join the back of the queue. Perhaps that would have encouraged a sense of humility.

In a final fit of petulance on Saturday night I breezed through the remote looking for anything to lift me out of my alcohol-free depression. I came across an old re-run showing Fozzy Bear, Miss Piggy, Kermit the frog et al. What a coincidence, it was the second bunch of Muppets I watched on Saturday night!