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So let us take up the Gayle view and ask the question: "In this new cricket business, where are England?"

The dismal conclusion must be that the Twenty20 train has left the station and England cannot direct where and how it will travel in the months and years ahead.

The driver's seat is occupied by India, who have accommodated Australia and South Africa in the driver's cab. England will be more in the role of passengers.

This will become most evident next month when the , with the final in Bombay just days after India play a Test against England.

The television rights for the Champions League have been sold for nearly $1bn - the Indian board will get 50%, Australia 30% and South Africa 20%. Australia's share means that over the next 10 years around $30m a year will pour into Australian cricket.

England will be represented in the Champions League by Middlesex and there will be a participation payment - a couple of million dollars - and prize money for Middlesex on top of that.

But the crucial point is that English cricket will not take part in the first ever Champions League as owners in the way that India, Australia and South Africa will.

The has been successfully modelled on English football's Premier League. The Champions League is modelled on the Uefa Champions League -and Indians are confident it will also be a success. Given how much the television rights have fetched it is hard to argue.

England were invited to join the party and come in as shareholders but Giles Clarke, chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, chose to have a party of his own.

His plan was for a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family to back a similar Twenty20 tournament in England. I am told India warned him it would not fly and they were right.
Their players were not available for Clarke's party and without them it could not attract sufficient television interest.

So, to compensate the England players for missing out on the Indian Twenty20 riches, England agreed to Sir Allen Stanford's proposals for a series of winner-takes-all matches against his Superstars team.

Publicly, but that is the hard reality.

The ECB claimed the match will benefit West Indian cricket and because it was televised to the US, it will finally help cricket break into the American market. Both ideas are naïve.

For more than a decade the ICC has been trying to break into the US market and failed. and the US sports market is not easy to break into as football knows only too well.

China, which the ICC is now targeting, is more realistic.

As for helping West Indies cricket, nothing could be more fanciful. What we saw in Antigua was West Indians playing an exhibition match for a rich man's ground and getting very well paid for it.

West Indies Cricket Board officials were mere bystanders - even Caribbean cricket legends who back Stanford, like Sir Vivian Richards, are contemptuous of the board.

It is hard to imagine another cricket nation where a private individual would be allowed to stage an international match in this fashion and it indicates how much of a broken reed West Indian cricket is.

Stanford may or may not revive the game in the Caribbean, but England's Twenty20 train cannot be hitched to that.

Hard as it is for the ECB to come to terms with Indian power, if the train is not to disappear completely out of sight they must seek an accommodation with India or there will have to be more sideshows like the one we have witnessed last week while the main Twenty20 action takes place thousands of miles away.