“Let’s drive up — I’m saving myself for Sunday,” he jokes, referring to the Virgin Cricket Classics one-day match to be held in a few days’ time in neighbouring Grenada which will feature some of cricket’s greatest English and West Indian names.

The match is a lighthearted affair between old foes (his side will go on to win); the man known as the “Master Blaster” has more pressing concerns. Sir Viv has moved into property development, which, he admits, is a very different ballgame.

We are standing on a 4.47-acre site at Willoughby Bay (or rather, a tiny cove within it called Daniel Bay) in the southeast of the island, the first stage of Sporting Icons Resorts, a joint venture between Richards and Masters Club, a Trinidadian developer experienced in high-end property development in the region.

Antigua, one of the northernmost islands in the Lesser Antilles, measures just 14 by 11 miles, and has since 1981 formed an independent Commonwealth nation of 69,000 people with Barbuda, a smaller island to the north. Winston Spencer, who became prime minister in 2004, has been working hard to boost tourism, which suffered badly in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, and is chasing super-rich second homeowners.

Richards’s plans are very much in keeping with that ethos. His Antigua project will consist of nine residential villas, aimed, if its name is to be believed, at some of the world’s greatest sportsmen and women.

So will we see the likes of Martina Navratilova popping over to Richards’s house to borrow a cup of sugar, as David Beckham pegs out Posh’s smalls two doors up? Not necessarily.

“This is just a theme, you know,” Richards admits. “Is it just going to be sporting personalities? No, no, no. You come and you can afford it, you can be living on the Sporting Icons complex.”

There is a clear push, though, to market the properties to sporting celebrities looking for a Caribbean hideaway. John Morris, the long-time Derbyshire — and, briefly, England test — batsman, who now works in property, has been brought in to help market them, and he and Richards are spreading the word discreetly among their international sporting icon chums. They won’t name names, but claim “strong interest” from at least one well-known British footballer, and a businessman linked to cricket.

Prices start at $2m (£1.07m) for a 4,000sq ft, three-bedroom villa, of which there will be four (one of which is being bought by Richards himself); £1.175m each for the three 4,800sq ft four-bed villas; and £1.6m for the top-of-the-range “Sir Vivian”: a 7,100sq ft, six-bedroom, one-off design with floor-to-ceiling windows, set on a third of an acre plot.

So what do you get for your money? John Yearwood, the Trinidad-based architect, has come up with an unusual, conch shell-shaped, white-rendered design for the properties, that is light years away from the traditional, plantation home look. They all have an unusual, upside-down design, with the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living space above.

Richards says the conch is a powerful Caribbean symbol. “When you’re watching cricket here, you’ll see guys blowing it. There’s a lot of people here, who because of their experiences in Europe and North America, want to build houses. because of what they’ve seen. We wanted to have something a little bit different.”

Eric Alexander, the contractor’s site manager, was initially bewildered by the design. “It looks crazy on paper, but as it’s taking shape you can really see how interesting it is,” he says.

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