CRICKET:THE STANFORD Cricket Ground was an area of calm yesterday morning before tonight's storm. Flags fluttered in anticipation of Antigua's November 1st Independence Day. In the middle, the yellow roadroller was trying to compact some substance into the brown strip on which cricketers of England and West Indies will compete for a sum of money beyond their dreams before their respective boards got into bed with an obscenely wealthy Texan self-publicist called Allen Stanford.
And to one side, in a powwow circle in front of their pavilion, sat the England players, listening intently as Kevin Pietersen spoke.
After a week of speculation, they had already been told the side that will play for a winner-takes-all purse of €789 453 a man and four of the circle were disappointed men, their share a possible €197,363 each, not unreasonable for non-participants but out of their own control. If the team loses, they too will get nothing.
The unfortunate four (if such a deal can be considered unfortunate) are Alastair Cook, Ravi Bopara, Ryan Sidebottom, who has an injury that would have precluded him anyway, and James Anderson. If the XI that will play appeared obvious from the way the first match against Middlesex went, then what we are seeing could be the first instance of a breakdown in spirit down strictly to money. All but Cook might have a genuine grievance: Bopara has played a significant part in the one-day side since the World Cup; Sidebottom is current England player of the year; Anderson has played the last 40 one-dayers.
Once the pitch revealed itself as one where the tallest "bang-it-in" bowlers could prosper more than a swing bowler, then Sidebottom and Anderson were living on borrowed time. Both might rue the timing of Steve Harmison's return from self-imposed one-day exile.
None of this, however, means Pietersen has the wrong side, and in any case the money should not be an issue in selection. In Harmison, Andrew Flintoff and Stuart Broad he has three of the tournament's most awkward seamers, while Paul Collingwood bowled with notable skill against Trinidad Tobago.
It may be the spin pairing of Samit Patel and Graeme Swann which provides the weak link against a side that contains some explosive strikers, starting with Chris Gayle.
This is not going to be the cakewalk for England that many expected. There is every reason to believe this side, not West Indies in the strictest sense, is a more thoughtfully appropriate squad, picked by a committee of Stanford's Legends which bypasses the usual West Indian politics.
