Was England's trip really worth it? There were more reasons to sound negative about the Stanford venture and to top it all, one of the richest sporting showpieces may well go down in history as the most impoverished in terms of entertainment value, writes Andy Bull in the Observer.

Matters of vulgarity, money and the future of Test cricket aside, there are other issues that should present English cricket with very real concern about the deal with Stanford. As recently as July, Bloomberg reported that two former employees of Stanford Financial were suing for unfair dismissal on the grounds that they had been forced to resign because they refused to participate in illegal conduct.

In the same paper, Vic Marks talks of the lessons learnt in the last week, one of which is that Twenty20 should not take over the world and secondly, the smell of money makes mankind behave in most peculiar ways.

The match may have been freakishly unusual but England’s performance was entirely consistent with the way they have often turned up for big one-day events overseas — undercooked, bearing a sort of post-colonial arrogance about whether they should actually dignify the occasion with their presence — and their reward was as royal a shafting as they got at the last two World Cups and the World Twenty20, writes Simon Wilde in the Sunday Times.

The England cricketers played as if infected by the official diffidence during the week, writes Scyld Berry in the Sunday Telegraph after the no-contest in Antigua.

In the Independent on Sunday, Stephen Brenkley wants all of Stanford's detractors to lighten up.

England are in effect playing an exhibition against a team raised and bankrolled by a rich man because he feels like it. Everything else that followed has been seized on – from the helicopter at Lord's to the unfortunate photo of Sir Allen bouncing one of the England players' wives on his knee this week.

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