The temptation when writing a column is to take the road less travelled, but this week the Spin's resolve has been shaken. Swagger forward Sir Allen Stanford.
Now, observers have objected to this hulking lump of Texan machismo for several reasons: he's American (and therefore vulgar); he behaved like a politician during his big day out at Lord's last week, waving vaguely into the middle-distance as he stepped out of his chopper; he made grown men in suits behave like excited children; he finds Test cricket "boring", poor sod; he has a moustache. But there is something else: behind the brilliantine smile and the metacarpal-endangering handshake, Stanford has the power to unsettle an England dressing room that is showing dangerous signs of cohesion. It may not be his intention, but that is beside the point.
The players have obviously decided that the best noun to describe the Twenty20 game in Antigua on November 1 is "bonus". This is an understandable psychological ploy, since it allows them to convince themselves that defeat won't be the end of their plans for a fifth home in the Caribbean, at least until the second of five, er, one-offs in 2009. The trouble is, flashes of honesty keep punctuating the cant.
Kevin Pietersen had Antigua in mind when he referred, only partly tongue in cheek, to the benefits of his nice red-inker in Friday's Twenty20 win in Manchester, and suggested that if he was a fast bowler he would be spending all his time honing his yorkers. Paul Collingwood believes players will struggle to choose between three hours' work for $1m or three months' hard slog for Ashes kudos. Even Michael Vaughan is playing Twenty20 cricket for Yorkshire - a first - while Marcus Trescothick was reported in the Observer not to have ruled out throwing his England helmet into the ring for the November 1 bonanza.
Yes, the players want to be on that flight, and it would be the height of hypocrisy to blame them for that. But the fear of missing out, the envy that will give way to jealousy, the feelings of injustice when one fringe player is preferred to another, the pressure - all these things, a normal part of a normal dressing room but exponentially amplified now, are bound to cause problems. It's why there was initially talk of the England players collecting an appearance fee, win or lose. Now even that safety net has been removed.
The Spin has nothing personal against Stanford, who has advertised with commendable openness his belief that business and philanthropy don't always mix. It's great that he is earmarking money for the West Indies Cricket Board, and even better if his investments in the Caribbean game reverse local fortunes.
But by introducing a concept that Simon Barnes, in yesterday's Times, called "reality TV", Stanford is stripping the game of everything that lends sport its edge: partisanship, tradition, competition, and all the individual battles that derive their intrigue from these contexts. Stanford's game offers a single factor: money. Even the cash-rich Indian Premier League relies on some tribalism.
There may never be a more hollow sporting encounter, even accounting for the cruel frisson to be had from the prospect of a tight finish (although how many Twenty20 games really go down to the last ball?) But what does it tell us about the men who run our game that Giles Clarke, the England and Wales Cricket Board chairman and a man proud to refer to himself as an "entrepreneur", expressed his glee about the idea of finding out who has the guts to bowl that final over? It's like cricket's answer to the Roman emperor's thumb in the Colosseum.
This is not anti-Twenty20 snobbery. The Spin relished its IPL sojourn and enjoys the thought of an international fixture-list containing only five-day cricket and the 20-over stuff. No, this is a warning that cricket may be about to unleash a soulless monster.
The suits insist that Test matches will remain at the top of cricket's food chain, but this is no more than guesswork designed to head criticism of Stanford off at the pass. Kent's Robert Key wondered last week whether youngsters coming into the game for the first time today would have their head turned by the intricacies of five-day ebb and flow or the ready money of Twenty20. Sad to say, it's a no-brainer, and not even the promise of more ECB money for their Test-winning players is going to make a difference.
Cricket has an exciting future, but playing the game in a vacuum for potentially divisive sums of money should not be part of it. And it's a silly moustache anyway.
Extract taken from The Spin, theguardian.com/sport's weekly take on the world of cricket.
