Maverick Texan billionaire Allen Stanford has offered the Australian, English and Indian cricketers $ 20 million from a single Twenty20 match next year in the West Indies.

He is wooing the cricketers to play against an all-star team from around the West Indies for a winner-takes-all prize of $ 20 million.

“If enough players in Australia or England or India know they have a chance to come down here to the Caribbean and walk away, each one of them, with millions of dollars in their pocket, I think it will probably happen,” Stanford was quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald.

The Indian cricket board had snubbed a similar invitation after its cricketers won the Twenty20 World Cup in September last year and has since trumped Stanford by launching the IPL.

“I invited the winner (of the Twenty20 world championship) to come over here (the West Indies) and play first for $ 5 million and then I said, ‘I’ll give you $ 10 million’. They said, ‘No, we don’t want to do that, because it would be endorsing a privately funded programme’. And look what they’ve done.”

The Texan suggested that the IPL tapped into the mercenary instincts of the modern sportsman. By contrast, he is adamant that in Stanford Twenty20, the domestic competition involving 21 Caribbean nations, cricketers will represent only their own islands.

“What I eventually want to have is what I call ‘the OK Corral’. Any time, any place, you come to our field and play one game, Twenty20, for $20 million. The best of our players against your team,” said the man whose previous proposal of an international quadrangular T20 tournament was shot down by the ICC.

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