The $20m winner-take-all match on November 1st between England and the Stanford Superstars was thrown into doubt today after the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) lost its arbitration case against its principal sponsors Digicel, the giant telecommunications company.

Having essentially sold the same set of rights twice, once to Digicel and once to Stanford, the WICB has been found to be in breach of contract and must now withdraw its sanction for the game.

This raises two possibilities: one, still the most unlikely, is that Allen Stanford will withdraw his support and the match will be cancelled. Surely, though, there is too much at stake – money and pride – for such an outcome.

The other, is that the main parties – the WICB, Stanford, Digicel and the England and Wales Cricket Board – will now conduct a series of hasty negotiations to enable the match to go ahead. The options are for Stanford to back down and grant Digicel its full sponsorship and commercial rights over the game; or for Stanford to put out a considerably weaker team so that, to all intents and purposes, it no longer represents the West Indies team, or for the WICB and the ECB to withdraw their official sanction of the event.

This last would be the most convenient but would also present the ECB in an unflattering, unprincipled light, since then the week-long tournament would be little different in status to the unauthorised Indian Cricket League, a tournament against which the ECB, along with other national governing bodies, has been stridently opposed.

For weeks now, the WICB, Stanford and the ECB have been saying that the tournament will go ahead and that the threat from Digicel’s arbitration case is little more than a minor inconvenience. The odds are still that the game will go ahead, but as Digicel have been saying all along, there are a few serious hurdles to overcome before it does.

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