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Kevin Pietersen has come out and said his side will not be “flash Harry’s” should the win the $20M prize in next months Stanford Twenty/20.  He has also said that should they win he will be giving a lot of it to charity. These are both noble sentiments especially from a man as confident and some would argue arrogant as the England captain.

However, should they do well enough to scoop crickets biggest cash prize, should they feel any embarrassment?

Well certainly with todays credit crunch and talk of Worldwide recession, with the average man in the street facing a tough couple of years, you could be forgiven for thinking its an obscene amount of money for what is essentially a days cricket.

However, lets put it into context.

These guys are professional sportsmen.  Up until very recently they have probably enjoyed a better salary than the average guy, and at the top end had this topped up with lucrative sponsorship deals.  However, lets not forget the life of most sportsmen is a short one.  Although they may earn more than most for a period of about 15 years, many have nothing to fall back on, and end up in low paid jobs for the remainder of their careers. Therefore money earned during this short period has to be invested to look after them later in life.
Now lets look at the Stanford prize in particular.  Yes, it is a lot of money for one days work.  However, let’s compare this prize fund to the type of money splashed around in Football, Rugby, Snooker and Golf for example.

The $20M prize fund pales into insignificance, when compared to the sums on offer in other sports, and which have been on offer to them for a number of years.  Premiership footballers are earning £50 - £120k per week - guaranteed by the way, and winning a Major golf tournament will make you an overnight millionaire.  In fact there is so much money on offer in golf now that average pros can become millionaires without ever winning an event.  Cricket has a long long way to go to get anywhere near these sort of numbers.
So is the amount of money on offer obscene. Yes, I guess is the short answer.

Should cricketers be embarrassed about earning it.  Definitely not.