I’m a patient man. Someone who can wait years for something to sort itself out – to get back on track, realise the error of its ways. Then, one day, it’ll dawn on me that it’s not going to find its way back, it’s a lost cause and it’s time to move on. That happened to me while watching the West Indies obliterate the England team in the second innings of the first Test Match in the current series in the Caribbean. Just to get things clear, the respective scores of our top five batsmen in that innings were 9, 0, 4, 1 and 1. West Indian bowler, Sulieman Benn who, along with the phenomenal Jerome Taylor, inflicted much of the damage, scored 23 runs – eight more than our top men combined. The scores of the top three West Indian batsmen in their first innings were 104, 6 and 107, so there’s no blaming the pitch.

So, my bruised fellow cricket betting comrades, can we blame the money? The IPL coughed-up $3 million for Pietersen and Flintoff (combined second-innings scores – 25) during the game and perhaps their minds were more on the colour of the Ferraris they were thinking about buying. Or perhaps Pietersen was contemplating the number of years he could rake in this kind of cash when Taylor sent his off stump cartwheeling down the ground.

In my experience, when large amounts of fantasy money come into play in any field, a lot of harm is done (e.g. football, banks etc). Soul and spirit exit stage left and Ferraris and helicopters enter stage right. Large mansions take the place of the Nirvana of cricketing excellence in the minds of the players and mammon is once again served.

The solution? There isnÂ’t one. We can slow things down a bit by machine gunning the entire ECCB and bringing in a modern and far-sighted governing body that is not floundering and bewildered by the current seismic shifts in world cricket. Engage a manager who has the final say in team selection, tactics and strategy (imagine a cricketing Alex Ferguson in charge of things) and thrash the team with nettles every morning but from now on, we will never see the glory days of cricket again.