Thank God for people like Jamaica Kincaid. The Antiguan-born writer, not known for pulling her punches, attended the ceremony at which Allen Stanford received his “knighthood” some years ago. She, too, was receiving a national award for her work and when Stanford went to shake her hand she refused, saying to his face: “Your honour demeans my own.”

That small snippet comes from a wonderful profile on Stanford and his involvement in cricket in The New Yorker magazine by Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer, which will be seen to be the definitive piece on that crazy episode. He goes on to quote Kincaid, who likens Stanford to a modern-day pirate. “He’s always been a crook,” Kincaid said. “And everybody knows it.”

Everybody may have known it, but few were prepared to say it. Because cricket has never been a wealthy game, and because cricketers have never been, by comparison, wealthy sportsmen, the rich have always enjoyed easy access and the benefit of an uncritical eye. Beneficiaries, looking to make good after ten years of toil for meagre returns, are routinely attracted, like moths to the flame, to those with a few quid, no matter what their deficiencies of character. Because of cricket’s relative normality, money disorientates those who play it.

The hope was that the lessons of Stanford would make people pause before rushing in at the first scent of money, but the recent stampede to try to cushion the failure of the Indian Premier League (IPL) to establish a second season in its home territory suggests that those lessons have not been learnt. The IPL has found its home in South Africa, but while the negotiations were continuing, where was English cricket’s Jamaica Kincaid? Nobody — certainly not the ECB, nor the county executives who cannot see beyond the next rupee — had the clear-eyed sense to say, and loudly, “thanks but no thanks” and spurn the handshake.

Linking the IPL and Stanford is not to suggest that the Indian tournament or those who back it are crooked or unworthy. Indeed, the IPL was, and may well be again, a magnificent success, bold in its conception, brilliant in its inception and dramatic throughout, a testament to the innovation, drive and financial muscle that sums up modern-day India. Twenty20, the best players in the world and Bollywood proved to be an alluring mix.

But the IPL is not a gift to the game as a whole. Nobody, except the Board of Control for Cricket in India, the franchise investors and the players, makes a bean out of the IPL. It is, put simply, a private commercial enterprise, an utterly ruthless one at that, and, because there can be only one of its kind, owing to the crowded nature of the international fixture list, it is in competition with every other member nation of the ICC.

Especially so with England, who, despite the failure to embrace an attractive franchise-based competition put forward by Surrey and MCC last year, still have designs to set up the English Premier League. When was the last time Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, offered a helping hand to this apple of Giles Clarke’s eye? Why, then, would the ECB chairman want to give a helping hand to a competitor in trouble?

The interest in the first season of the IPL was not so much the cricket, which was routine, but the way in which the tournament rewrote existing power relationships. This was the free market set to work on a sport that had been feudal for so long. It was the ultimate expression of cricketing capitalism: franchises were sold to wealthy businessmen, players were paid according to their value in the open market, bartered for, haggled over and sold to the highest bidder, a value that then floated, like a stock-market share, according to that player’s performance. The winning of games was incidental to the raging egos of the owners (“my players have told me,” said the preening Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood star and owner of Kolkata Knight Riders, “that they have never met a better human being”) and the return on their investment.

It was soon clear, though, that the IPL was not about to subject itself to the principles of the free market. In particular, it did not much care for competition. The IPL has attempted to put the Indian Cricket League (ICL), another Twenty20 tournament organised on the same guidelines as the IPL (and, indeed, one that predated it), out of business as surely as if it were a market trader touting for trade on its own patch.

Anybody — cricketers, agents, commentators, umpires — with links to the ICL has been ostracised, the ruthlessness and pettiness of those who run the IPL best summed up recently in New Zealand when Sachin Tendulkar was withdrawn from a charity match because of the contaminating presence of an ICL player in the same fixture.

In time, people will come to wonder how and why, in response to this brazen self-interest, the member countries of the ICC came to give up their best players to a private competition in return for nothing — except a lot of hassle. What does English cricket get in return for allowing Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen to play in the IPL during the English season? Nothing, except a few weeks on tenterhooks, hoping that neither gets injured before the Test series against West Indies, the World Twenty20 and the Ashes.

Some will regard this argument as petty — an extension of the ridiculous spat recently over whether Phillip Hughes or Stuart Clark should hone their competitive instincts in England before the Ashes — and wonder why cricket cannot move beyond nationalism. If the IPL benefited all, then that argument would hold water. But when Emerging Media sold an 11.7 per cent share of Rajasthan Royals this year, the astronomical profit went to the investors alone.

Fair enough. Emerging Media took the risk and raked in the proceeds. But when the market dips — and one can only imagine the financial fallout if the IPL had not found an ersatz home — the normal rules of the free market (pre-credit crunch, at any rate) should apply. The IPL has played a ruthless game so far and should not expect anything less in return.

And because commercial language is the only language understood by those such as Andy Nash, the Somerset chairman, who suggested that the ECB should “move heaven and earth” to host the IPL in England, let us put the argument more simply: why would you risk devaluing your own “products” — your first-class competition, your premier one-day competition and your opening Test matches of the season — to inflate the value of your prime competitor?

There are other, more compelling arguments, such as the lunacy of seeing Flintoff or Owais Shah playing for franchises down the road from where their counties, who have nurtured them, are playing. But cricketing arguments have long been lost on decision-makers. The IPL in England? Some would call it an opportunity; others of a more clear-eyed persuasion would fashion a rather more damning description.