Anne Robinson is the one name that will not be needed in the England squad for the $20 million Twenty20 fixture against Sir Allen Stanford’s All Stars – for the players will be able to pick out the weakest link in their team without the help of television’s infamous quiz show host.

No matter what they say, and how many times they try to convince themselves that it really doesn’t matter, there isn’t one of the 15 players chosen yesterday for the West Indies match who hasn’t, in the deep recesses of his mind, already spent the bumper prize. At stake is a pot full of money that would take even the best-paid Test player three or four years to make – much, much longer for a lesser-known member of the squad.

For the first time, cricketers have the chance to make the sort of money that would make even Lewis Hamilton or Steven Gerrard get out their savings books with glee.

The question is whether England will be as much of a team when they fly home as when they arrive to contest this extravagant one-off contest. Will the prospect of a prize of £500,000 a man divide or rule?

The danger is that defeat leads to the search for a scapegoat; for the man who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with a full set of butter-fingers as that vital catch drops out of the blue towards him. Or the man with the brain that dissolves to red mist when cool heads are needed.

Sophia Jowett, at the Loughborough School of Sport and Exercise Science, believes the England players are professional enough to treat even this lavish and extraordinary fixture as just another match. If they don’t, then they can forget paying off the mortgage or buying a house in Dubai with their winnings. But even she is worried that the weakest link could emerge from a greedy pack.

“Professionals should not put any particular importance on the money unless they feel there is someone among them who is getting it without having the right credentials or who has not contributed,” she says.

Professionals will be professional – at least up to the point when they see Sir Allen putting his dollar bills back into his wallet and pointing to the exit.