So, suddenly you can earn big money playing cricket. Forget about the Champions’ League and the IPL, the seriously big money is now in the Stanford Super Stars series (or whatever it ends up being called). For those of you not plugged in to cricket news, this will be a five game series between England and the Stanford Super Stars (presumably mainly West Indians, but you never know, Stanford may get serious about winning), each of which carries a $20 million prize purse. That sum is divided as follows: $1m each of the 12 players in the winning team; $1m for the coaches and the rest of the winning squad; and $7m to be divided between the English and West Indies cricket boards. The latter sum will doubtless include salaries for the losing team.

Naturally there has been a certain amount of doom and gloom predicted, most of it for daft reasons such as worrying how the players will cope under the pressure. Presumably if Agnew were reporting on soccer he’d be calling for penalty shoot-outs to be banned because they upset the players. I’m rather more worried about whether the grand plan actually works. The problem looks like this…

What we have right now is a game that works really well on TV. It is about 3 hours long, it has a lot of action, it often produces nail-biting finishes. And now it has the attraction of a really big purse available to the winners. That should ensure media attention, which should in turn ensure sponsorship, which should in turn mean a lot more money for the sport in general. From Stanford’s point of view, it will mean that young kids in the West Indies will once again want to play cricket rather than turning their attention to the basketball opportunities in the USA, or soccer in Europe. But for the rest of the cricket world the big question will be whether all this excitement catches on in large media markets beyond the UK and India. Only time will tell, but the BBC has found at least one US newspaper taking up the story. Progress.

In the meantime, English county players all have a chance to prove themselves in the Twenty20 Cup which started today. Somerset, sadly, were a mess. I don’t think they have the bowlers, or the calmness under pressure, needed to win. Kent, on the other hand, look quite good. For now I shall console myself with the fact that the Royals got thrashed in their opening game in the IPL.