Trinidad and Tobago captain Daren Ganga has led his team brilliantly in the Champions League so far. Last night, the team pulled off an astonishing win as Kieron Pollard made 54 not out from 18 balls when the West Indians looked buried. Afterwards, Ganga talked Stanford, Twenty20 and West Indies …

Could you give the full West Indies side a game – could you be a national side on your own?
We have played them in the past. But we are not thinking of taking on the West Indies. West Indies cricket is so much more valuable to all the West Indies people. It is the only thing in the Caribbean that unifies. The Champions League can be seen as a positive so that West Indies cricket in the end benefits. We have all seen the results of Sir Allen Stanford and his investment in the Caribbean and in young cricketers. What we are doing here will go and inspire so that West Indies cricket can be improved and enhanced.

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As I said, the most important thing about Stanford was not the money but actually getting the players tuned up for India. One of the key skills about an England tour to the sub-continent is having your moaning in really tip-top order, so that when you arrive, you’re ready to hit the ground complaining.

“Bang… The hotel’s not up to scratch… bang… That bloke’s looking at my missus… bang… This foreign muck don’t half play havoc with my guts…”

We worked on all those key areas in Antigua and that’s going to stand the lads in good stead here, barricaded in the honeymoon suite of the Swallow Hotel, Mumbai, watching Only Fools And Horses re-runs on UK Gold Plus Eight.

India is such an amazing, diverse place; to give you just one example, they call a Custard Cream a ‘Milk Biki’! From the days of Gatt’s Branston to Priory and Andersony passing up an opportunity to ride Sri Lankan elephants so they could play Championship Manager in the hotel for 18 hours, an England tour offers wonderful opportunities to see the world and interact with the locals.

However, we’re professionals and that means doing things for money. I want our lads to take pride in that, but not show it too much, but also to demonstrate that pride 100 per cent at all times. I was absolutely clear about that in the Stanford tournament and it was a bit disappointing the message didn’t get through.

As I’ve said elsewhere, a lot of our boys just couldn’t get their heads around the concept of the tournament – playing cricket and only getting paid if you do well. To be fair, we’ve tried to move away from that sort of one-dimensional “rewarding success” thinking in Team England and Michael Vaughan’s central contract is just one example of how effective it can be.

In the Stanford, we just came up against a side who wanted to win more than we did. It was a new experience, other than for the lads who’ve played against Australia, or South Africa… or India…

Their boys also seemed to be a bit better at cricket, but you can’t prepare for everything.

But that which does not kill me makes me stronger, as a wise man (Duncan Bannatyne, at the ‘Winning For Winners Management Seminar And Book Signing’, Croydon Conference Centre) once said. And there’s no reason whatsoever to suppose that we can’t come back from India with a few quid, and maybe even a victory in a One-Day International.

Alan Tyers found Peter Moores’ diary while he was looking for cold pizza in a bin outside Croydon Conference Centre

Tuesday night can’t have been fun for John McCain and his team as the news of their electoral defeats in state after state were communicated to them. I know exactly how they felt, because on Saturday night, during the 20:20 for 20 game, an Australian friend texted me every time an England wicket fell. His actions may have swelled the coffers of England’s team sponsor by £1.20, but that was little comfort for me.

Until that night I didn’t think I was concerned about the Stanford game, but I was wrong. Losing hurts, no matter what it is or who it is against. And losing like that is agony. I was nowhere near a television that night, but in the days since have managed to see as much of the game as possible and it makes for horrendous, nightmarish viewing, like a dress rehearsal in which no-one knows quite where they should be standing and people come on carrying the wrong props. They were even dazzled by the lights.

Peter Moores said it was all about attitude, and that our thinking had all been wrong. He even implied there might have been too much thinking (which sounds dangerously like bollocks). It is hard to imagine anybody being able to use that excuse convincingly anywhere. “Your honour, although my client’s actions may appear thoughtless, the truth is in fact quite the opposite. At the very moment he took the staff of that depot hostage he was, if anything, thinking too much…”

The idea that England allowed themselves to think too much about the nature of the game and the contradictions it threw up seems far-fetched. Moores made it sound as if each and every member of the team went out to bat and immediately suffered an existential crisis. As if someone as happy-go-lucky as Paul Collingwood would suddenly raise an arm during the bowler’s delivery stride and howl plaintively “Oh never mind the cricket – what are any of us actually put on this world for?”

In fact, England’s behaviour during the week seemed directionless. The team was like a giant, confused pensioner who had wandered into a tournament and then immediately forgotten what it was doing there. It’s true that before the game all manner of journalists were suggesting that this sort of tournament raised serious questions about cricket, about where the game is going, and about why people play. But if they were looking for grand and philosophical answers to these questions, they needn’t have bothered, because England’s performance provided a simple answer to an apparently complex question: the point is to win.

Next year, if it goes ahead, it will be a very different game indeed. By losing the fixture so emphatically, we have given the game more meaning than it perhaps deserves. For Stanford it is a job well done – people can’t call the cricket he creates meaningless if the guys playing the games feel as much pressure as England appeared to. But England, whilst hurting, have also done themselves a favour. Next year they won’t be distracted by the money, and the glitz. They will return with a serious grudge and with pride to play for.

Anyway, let’s hope it’s just a blip. We’ve only got seven one-dayers to enjoy against India before we get to take on the most exciting team in the world in a whole two Tests. Isn’t international scheduling fun!

Miles Jupp is an actor, comedian and cricket fan

1. Next time, don’t just change the name, change the team.
The Stanford Superstars are the best performers from the Stanford 20/20 so let’s do the same. Make the English team an all-stars XI from the Twenty20 Cup which would add kudos to that tournament and provide the Stanford event with the sort of context so lacking from last week’s farrago.

2. The jury’s still very much out on Peter Moores.
If the players were, as KP claimed, distracted by “nonsense” then this should have been the perfect opportunity for the coach to show us what he’s made of and ensure the players were switched on to the game. Instead, he trotted the same lame excuses as the rest of them.

3. KP is the new Tony Greig.
The obvious similarities were there before but his revoltingly condescending quotes about how Chris Gayle and his team needed the money more took him dangerously close to ‘grovel’ territory.

4. Leave the Wags at home.
They got plenty of the flak in Ashes 2006-07 and now at least one of them is the centre of another storm, albeit not entirely of their own making. A return to old-fashioned values is the only option – let them admire from afar. Or alternatively go the whole hog and give them the full Ryder Cup treatment. And then you find out which player invites his Mum along, like Jose Maria Olazabal.

5. England are mentally frail.
When push came to shove, they weren’t up for it. Whatever their misgivings about the event, there is no excuse for being completely ill-prepared for a game against a team of mostly sub-international players. The paradox is, of course, had they being playing Australia …

John Stern is editor of The Wisden Cricketer

Some people were playing a cricket match in Antigua to win $20million. We were going to a bar in Manchester. It was hard to see the connection.

The connection was that we were going to the official UK Stanford VIP party. Did we want cocktails? Did we want some canapés? Did we want a big screen showing the match? Did we want to see Glen Chapple? This was the place to be.

You shouldn’t caricature people but if you imagine a typical cricket supporter The Living Room on Deansgate is exactly the kind of place he (yes, he) wouldn’t go. But this was Twenty20 and it was for money. They were presumably after a different sort of person. We were intrigued to see if that sort of person actually existed.

We were greeted with the first of our two free cocktails at the door. It was yellow and sticky and we weren’t unduly bothered that the second and final free cocktail wasn’t due until the innings break. In reality, the odd one was proffered during England’s innings, but we restrained ourself.

The VIP room had lots of people standing up. We don’t mind standing up but we were a VIP. VIPs sit down. We went and sat with some strangers.

The strangers, Paul and Dave, were decent sorts. They’d been to a lot of Lancashire Twenty20 matches that season. Maybe they were the target audience. While they were more enthusiastic about the match than most of the VIPs, that only meant they were more enthusiastic than ‘not at all enthusiastic’.

Dave had entered a competition on Lancashire’s website. “I won – so I felt like I had to come.”

During the Superstars’ innings, we spoke about England’s slow, inevitable defeat; how everyone already knew the result, but the players had to play it out and we had to watch it.

“It happened at a few of the Lancashire matches this season,” said Dave. “It’s like having a knife slowly pushed into your chest.”

I asked if this match felt like that.
“No.”

Lacking the burden of caring how the match went, we tucked into the jerk chicken and pastie things that surfaced around this point and when we finished, England promptly lost.
Then there was another celebrity appearance. Glen Chapple had given out prizes between innings, but this was far better than that. It was Oliver Newby.

Granted, we might have been alone in being genuinely enthused about this, but we were right and everyone else was wrong. You can usually count on Oliver Newby to say something amusingly sordid whenever he’s interviewed. On this occasion he said that he’d enjoyed watching Chris Gayle. “I’m partial to a bit of Chris Gayle spanking,” he said.

In the spirit of VIP-dom we got a taxi home. It cost loads.

The Proper British result was achieved in the Caribbean.

There is simply no bad news out of the Antigua demolition on Saturday.

Poor cricketers got money. No WAGs were harmed.

The English team learnt to think about cricket and playing on low slow wickets.

The ECB gets 12 months to think about whether they really want to be the Bearded Lady in Stanford’s freak show.

And most importantly English fans get to take the piss. No one likes losing more than an English cricket fan. This match even more so.

How often can you say: “Jeez we is crap, we can’t even beat some Yank’s Real Estate XI”? This week you English fans can.

And it gets better. By losing, you are reigniting the Calypso Cricket flame that has been out since Richie Richardson put on his helmet.

But wait, there is more, you are also snubbing your hoity-toity noses at the global whoring of cricket.
When England lost is was like a slap in the face to money, or in Prior or KP’s case, they turned their back on it.

So this is a win, win, win, win, win, win and win, situation.

It even made me happy, KP’s little chat with Nasser after the game was worth 20 million of someone else’s dollars.

That makes it a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, and win, situation.

With a success rate like this, it should be held once a week.

Jrod is an Australian cricket blogger, his site Cricketwithballs.com won July’s Best of Blogs in TWC

Hello diary, it’s me, Steve.

It’s like our mam used to say when we were kids: be careful what you wish for. It was true when I said I wished I could fly and Mad Uncle Togga threw us off the church hall roof, and it’s true now.

I had my reservations about two weeks in the Caribbean – what would the tea and coffee-making facilities be like, would they have Lovejoy on the telly, would Fred try and make us drink Linseed martinis with a sparkler in – and it gives me no pleasure to say I have been proved right about the place.

Sure, all of us want to be a millionaire but not at all costs. We make sacrifices, I accept that: for instance, I’m willing to play cricket. And if absolutely necessary, abroad. But seeing your lass used as a plaything for a billionaire?

Maybe that’s how they go on in Texas. Apparently they shoot turkeys there, for fun. Can you imagine, being a little turkey, all peaceful like and eating your corn or rice or whatever it is they eat and then suddenly Sir Allen Stanford creeps up, shoots you in the face, bounces you up and down on his lap and then shoots you in the face again? No thanks. Not for me. Not even for two million.

Sir Stanford was well out of order with them girls. Matt Prior’s lass was very upset: she told us that there’s only one bloke she wants to bounce her on his lap and that’s her Matt, and if he drops her, well so be it, the lad’s a 110 per center and everyone drops things occasionally and it’s how you react that matters.

Then when all the lads got sick off the foreign food that was the final straw for me. I’m not one to say I told you so, but that’s the abroad hat-trick, isn’t it? Having to play cricket, them natives trying to have their way with your womenfolk and you’re stuck in the toilet praying for death.

That’s not to say the money wouldn’t be welcome. But in future, maybe we could hold the event round my way in Ashington. We’ll get a local sponsor no problem: what’s Sir Stanford got that Northern Rock haven’t? And we’ll have the game on the local rec.

Alright, maybe we won’t get a million each, but at least nobody will get ill on mam’s cooking and I personally guarantee nobody will get bounced on a lap nor shot in the face neither, providing Uncle Togga’s kept well tethered up in the yard.

Alan Tyers found Harmy’s diary by Allen Stanford’s swimming pool

Allen Stanford could only have generated more column inches in the British press this week if he’d started branching out into prank calls. We now know Gordon Brown’s important thoughts about Brand and Ross but can only speculate on his feelings regarding the inaugural 20/20 for 20. But he’d just jump on the general consensus bandwagon again and voice reservations about Saturday’s high-stakes contest.

Stanford has been attracting the snobbery that the English reserve for those with newly acquired wealth and his taste has been questioned over his slapstick canoodling with England’s WAGs, which has resulted in more fuss than is strictly necessary. Someone even had a go at Emily Prior for sitting on a man’s lap in her pregnant state – as if it was that sort of careless behaviour that got her that way in the first place.

While the Stanford tournament has been gathering pace, I have been working in the company of distinctly non-cricketing people, savages who accuse us of speaking in code. I find these laboured anti-cricket diatribes irritating and their orators, usually unaware of their lack of originality, hard to silence. One cricket-mad friend interrupts these ranters saying “cricket is a very important part of my life actually” and then looking hurt, which embarrasses people into feeling as if they’ve criticised someone’s belief system.

Last week I was in Taunton with a spare afternoon and even though it was raining I felt a visit to the county ground a better way of passing time than a self-destructive visit to a Wetherspoons.

Although the museum was closed, the shop was open and selling at recession-proof prices. And October is clearly the best time of year to buy a new bat, although I’m not in the market for one – mine is three years old and has only suffered 40 runs worth of damage, most of them during a blistering innings of 28 by a team-mate.

I asked about a copy of Trescothick’s autobiography but was told there were none left. They could order one in for me, they said, which sounded a little old fashioned. Perhaps I’m better off without it if it’s as gloomy as Graham Thorpe’s – generally considered by academics to be the most depressing piece of non-Russian literature ever written.

Out in the middle of the square there stood a scare crow. Apparently sea gulls have caused ten grand’s worth of damage. I wonder what Stanford would do if birds threatened his beloved fixture – I reckon he’d sit on the steps of the pavilion and shoot them himself.

I assumed that you had to be important to visit the Centre Of Excellence, but decided to risk it anyway. As soon as I stepped through the door an efficient looking man appeared in my path. “Can I help?” he asked. “Erm, I just sort of wanted to have a bit of a look around really,” I replied, expecting to be bundled from the premises. “Sure,” he said, “no problem. There’s a viewing gallery upstairs, you know.” “You mean that? It’s actually OK just to wander about the place”. And it really was. I didn’t even need a CRB check. I strolled about looking at photos and reading motivational messages posted up everywhere. And upstairs, in the viewing gallery, not only were there armchairs but also a coffee machine and a huge pile of old Wisden Cricketers that saw me through the rest of the afternoon. You don’t get that in Wetherspoons.

All of this seemed a world away from the shenanigans in the West Indies. Nothing I’ve seen or read about the games makes me want to be there but my visit on this damp day to Taunton made me desperate to return to watch a game in summer. Taunton in the rain was still a joyful experience. I suspect that in similar conditions the Antigua SCG could only be a disappointment.

Miles Jupp is an actor, comedian and cricket fan

The Stanford Super Series has become the farce that Lawrence Booth feared in this very ether two weeks ago. Slow pitches, low scores and lower crowds have remarkably been overshadowed by the vulgarity of Stanford himself, and we haven’t even had the main event. So as the $20 million match approaches we pose the crucial question: Do you care who wins the Stanford Twenty20?

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You can tell the cricket’s boring in Antigua: tongues are wagging about the Wags. Given Sir Allen Stanford’s penchant for self-publicity, could it be that he decided to distract attention from the worrying absence of hit-and-giggle on the field with a spot of slap-and-tickle off it? Maybe not, but the very essence of the Super Series encourages cynicism and it’s hard to escape its pull.

Emily Prior may know the feeling. The instant reaction at Wisden Towers when pictures of the England wicketkeeper’s wife bouncing on Sir Allen’s knee flashed across the screen was “Indecent Proposal”, the film where the old rich bloke played by Robert Redford offers the husband of the nubile young woman played by Demi Moore $1m to sleep with her. OK, so the analogy lacks some crucial details but the essentially mercenary nature of everything that is happening in Antigua did not make the comparison as far-fetched as it seems.

No one emerges from – oh, go on then – Wag-gate with much credit. The England players seem to have over-reacted to what may have been nothing more than a gauche piece of bonhomie from a man who doesn’t do subtle. The wives and girlfriends in question could have exerted their status as equal members of the human race and refused to be patronised. And Stanford really should have shown better judgement, regardless of whether ownership of a cricket ground and vast chunks of a Caribbean idyll might do funny things to a bloke’s sense of self-entitlement.

But, oh, the money! This is why Wag-gate palls. Kevin Pietersen claims his team are only in Antigua because they are employed by the ECB, who want them there. (Look out for more orders being followed without demur when Peter Moores cautions against too much time at next year’s Indian Premier League.) But their pact with Stanford automatically surrenders the moral high ground. It’s no good bleating about flashy behaviour now.

In that respect, the Wags may be less innocent than they seem. Flirting with the spouse’s boss is a tactic rather older than reverse-swing and twice as effective. But the episode arguably enters the realms of the seedy if the ladies felt they had no choice but to flirt with a figure who could boost their husbands’ bank balances beyond recognition. And this is where Wag-gate transcends tabloid tittle-tattle and becomes a metaphor for the entire week.

If Stanford was overplaying his hand because of who he is, and if Emily and Co felt obliged to smile along for the cameras just in case, then Wag-gate counts as a contrivance that fits all too snugly into Stanford’s tasteless world of helicopter landings, Perspex crates, cricket grounds whose superficial beauty is not matched by the conditions and proud former West Indian players paid off as brand ambassadors yet looking as if they would be rather be anywhere else.

Like everything else in the Super Series, what some may dismiss as a bit of fun may turn out to be far more than that.

Lawrence Booth writes on cricket for the Guardian. His third book, Cricket, Lovely Cricket? An Addict’s Guide to the World’s Most Exasperating Game is out now published by Yellow Jersey