Stanford Super Series
 |
|
| Countries |
 Antigua and Barbuda |
|---|---|
| Format | Twenty20 |
| Tournament format | One off match with warm ups |
| Number of teams | 4 |
The Stanford Super Series were a series of Twenty20 cricket matches in 2008, sponsored by Allen Stanford. The main game of the Series matched the English national cricket team against an all-star team from the Caribbean, called the Stanford Superstars.
The prize money awarded in the tournament was winner-take-all; the players for the winning team in the yearly game took home $20 million prize money, and the losing players did not earn anything. The domestic West Indies and England Twenty20 champions competed for the Champions Cup, as well as playing in a series of other exhibition matches with the Superstars and England. The tournament collapsed following the arrest (and subsequent conviction) of Allen Stanford for an $8 billion fraud, part of which funded the prize money for the Super Series.
Allen Stanford proposed emphasizing Twenty20 cricket as a way to promote cricket in the West Indies. He created the Stanford 20/20, a yearly tournament featuring teams from the island nations that made up the West Indies. From the first edition of his tournament in 2006 he aimed to have the best players from his tournament play as a team against an international team. Initially South Africa had been planned to play against the Stanford team for a prize of US$5 million, but that effort fell through after scheduling conflicts with the WICB.
In 2008, Stanford looked to expand the tournament, and decided once again to feature a high-stakes game featuring the best players in the West Indies versus an international team. Stanford initially wished to invite Sri Lanka, India, Australia and South Africa to come and play a single elimination tournament in Antigua, with the winner facing his all-star team. However due to contractual issues with the ICC and ESPN-Star and scheduling constraints that tournament was infeasible. Instead, Stanford invited the winners of the World Twenty20, India, to play for a prize of US$5 million (later US$10 million) and planned to ask Australia to come as a back-up should India decline or be unavailable. India, who were in the process of launching the highly successful first year of their domestic Twenty20 league, the Indian Premier League, declined as they did not want to be involved in a privately funded programme.
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