Analysis: Mike Atherton

English cricket is facing another financial blow after reports that Sir Allen Stanford is ready to pull out of cricket after suffering heavy losses over his $20million contest in Antigua last month. With Vodafone, sponsors of the England team, announcing yesterday that their annual £4m commitment will not be renewed beyond 2010, and contracts with npower and NatWest due to expire next year, the loss of Stanford's riches would be a major setback to the ECB purse strings as well as the credibility of Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman.

Stanford is understood to have lost $40m from the first of the five annual matches with half of that sum spent in an attempt to secure television and sponsorship deals to spread his profile in the American market.

Sources say that on Tuesday he told his staff that he will disband the eight-man Board of Legends, including Sir Vivian Richards, who were ambassadors for the programme, and curtail his involvement in the sport.

Clarke, in Mohali with the England party for the second Test in India, is urgently seeking confirmation of Stanford's intentions and a spokesman for the ECB said that it was unaware of any decision to pull the plug on the five-year contract. The most recent contact was at a meeting in London a fortnight ago when Stanford gave no hint of his apparent plans.

Of the $20m put up for the Stanford Twenty20 for 20, only $3.5m went to the ECB. Players in the successful Stanford Superstars team secured $1m apiece with $2m shared between squad members and the backroom staff. Another $3.5m went to the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) to assist grassroots development in the Caribbean, a point stressed by the ECB as the week in Antigua became a public relations failure. However, Stanford is known to be frustrated by the WICB and was annoyed that a dispute with Digicel, the West Indies sponsors, escalated in the weeks before the game.

Clarke and his colleagues hoped that the Stanford money would be viewed by players as an alternative to the Indian Premier League (IPL), but the deal will not persuade the likes of Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff to eschew money to be made on the subcontinent which does not depend on results.

As big a concern for the ECB is the future of the quadrangular tournament which was introduced as a footnote to the $20m contest. It is due to be held at Lord's shortly before the ICC World Twenty20 next summer and is worth $9.5m per year, again over five years.