Matt Prior did not appear to be suffering from whatever was causing the rest of his teammates to drop catches, but no one would have blamed the England wicketkeeper if he had spilt a chance after looking up at the giant screen to see his pregnant wife sitting on the knee of a middle-aged billionaire.

Prior and some of the other England players were said to be embarrassed, uncomfortable and perhaps a little angry at what they regarded as inappropriate behaviour from Allen Stanford, the Texan who is bankrolling the Stanford Super Series.

Stanford was seen mixing with the players’ wives and girlfriends during the warm-up match against Middlesex on Sunday. He is said to have placed Emily Prior on his lap and put his arm around Alice Hunt, the girlfriend of Alastair Cook.

The billionaire appeared to be enjoying himself, but the women were allegedly reluctant to refuse his advances because these matches culminate in the winner-takes-all clash on Saturday that could result in their other halves walking away with $1 million each.

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Stuart Broad, the England bowler, said: “There were a few gobsmacked faces when it popped up on the big screen. I didn’t see it because I was bowling the over but I think Matt Prior had a bit of a shocked look on his face.”

The episode added an edge to the relaxed atmosphere at the Stanford Cricket Ground and the lacklustre cricket on the field. Excellence is not something you find much of in Twenty20 cricket - at least not the kind of sustained excellence that is needed to succeed in the longer forms of the game - but even by the standards of this bastardised version of the game, the quality of cricket has been woeful. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the catching department: by my reckoning, seven catches went down in the game between the Stanford Superstars and Trinidad & Tobago, seven more when England played Middlesex, and numerous in the practice that took place immediately after that match.

Not many of them were difficult. With the exception of a slip catch put down by Murali Kartik, a couple of more difficult ones at backward point to the normally reliable Paul Collingwood, and what Shaun Udal described as “one of the great Auntie’s bloomers in history” when Andrew Strauss somehow put down a dolly from Andrew Flintoff, most of the drops have come from skyers.

Having missed what was the second-easiest dropped catch I have seen on a cricket field (not even this blooper could compete with Mike Gatting’s fumble at silly point in Madras in 1993), Strauss initially pointed to the floodlights in mitigation. Then he realised that the gentle parabola of Flintoff’s nudge to mid-wicket did not go high enough for that excuse to be used, and he laughed off his embarrassment In fairness to the players, they had been given no opportunity to practise under lights in the dark before the opening skirmishes. But now that they have, they are grumbling about the quality of Stanford’s lights. Can’t this man afford decent ones? All this has raised the spectre, of course, of some poor sucker circling under a $20 million catch come the big game on Saturday. Theories have been put forward: the floodlights are a little low because of the airport restrictions next door, so that when the ball goes above the light it “fades into oblivion”, according to Udal. Another player ventured that it was a little dark. More wattage, Allen!

Julian Fountain, the Stanford Superstars’ fielding coach, reckoned that the white balls fall out of the sky at a quicker rate than the red ones, something that Sir Isaac Newton would no doubt dispute. England’s fielding coach, Richard Halsall, has prudently kept his counsel.

It might have been wise for Kevin Pietersen and Udal to do the same after the match on Sunday. Pietersen said that he was as concerned about the lights as he was about the two-paced pitch - and every other player is likely to be concerned as well. That is hardly likely to help to calm nerves come the big night. On the other hand, Pietersen might think instead about substituting Andy Flower, the batting coach, into action.

After the players had embarrassed themselves at practice, Flower showed them how to do it. Shelling peas.