Will $20M Twenty20 Cricket Tournament Spark Interest In U.S.?

Stanford Hopes To Bring Twenty20 Cricket To U.S.

Stanford Financial Group Chair Allen Stanford is offering a $20M purse for an upcoming cricket match in Antigua, and while his "primary motivation is to revive cricket's fading fortunes in the Caribbean," he also is "hoping it will stir up interest in the final frontier: the U.S," according to Bobby Ghosh of TIME. The November 1 match, pitting England against a team of Caribbean All-Stars, is offering "far and away the largest purse for any team sport." Stanford is "betting the match," played using the new Twenty20 form of cricket, will "attract a TV audience of 700 million." Twenty20, the "newest format of the game, ... is shorter than [an MLB] game, as fiercely contested as [an NHL] match and between teams dressed more colorfully" than the Lakers. Stanford in '07 spent $3.5M to "test-market the sport" in Fort Collins, Colorado, "using billboards and bus-stop ads to persuade the town's 130,000 residents to watch a telecast of a Twenty20 tournament in the Caribbean." Stanford, "on the basis of that experiment," believes that an "American viewer can 'understand Twenty20 in as little as 20 minutes.'" Cricket Australia Public Affairs GM Peter Young said of the Twenty20 format, "It's a format that gives us the potential for the game to become a genuinely global sport." But the critics said that the big spending "makes for good publicity but not necessarily good business" (TIME, 7/21 issue).