PLATFORM:IT LOOKS like Denis O'Brien is about to be ambushed in the Caribbean. Digicel, O'Brien's mobile phone network, is a huge sponsor of West Indies cricket. It pays $125 million (€79 million) to appear on the shirt of the West Indies team in a five- year deal that has helped to build the company's brand across the region.
Cricket remains a central part of life and Digicel has engendered considerable goodwill at a time when the game is losing the battle for young hearts and minds to soccer and the NBA.
The West Indies Cricket Board however has had its head turned by another billionaire, Sir Allen Stanford. The Texan, who made his fortune in banking and real estate, is a resident of Antigua, and has put up $100 million to stage five winner-takes-all Twenty20 matches involving a West Indies team, aka the Stanford All Stars, and England.
The first match takes place this autumn, with $20 million going to the winning team. Of this, $1 million will go to each player on the winning side, $1 million will be shared by the backroom team and $1 million will be split between the non-participating squad players.
That leaves $7 million - $3.5 million each for the respective boards, the WICB and ECB. Not bad for three hours work.
The Stanford Twenty20 is not an official West Indies team game and the team will be branded in the black and silver of Stanford's own company, not their traditional maroon shirts.
Most pertinent to O'Brien, the Digicel name will also be absent.
Given this is likely to be the biggest media event to hit West Indies - and English - cricket for many years, Digicel would miss out on millions of euros of media coverage. The company's director of sponsorship Kieron Foley, an ex- pat Irishman and one of O'Brien's trusted lieutenants, is seething.
"We have no problem with the game," said Foley, "However, we have a sponsorship agreement with the WICB and in that instance, it gives us sole and exclusive rights as principal sponsors of cricket in the West Indies and this agreement must be honoured.
"We put in tens of millions of dollars every year and what we are trying to do is to make sure that our rights are protected."
There is irony here. Ireland's cricketers will remember Foley as the charming man who made them so welcome in the Caribbean last year when the team played in the ICC Cricket World Cup. Digicel's largesse ran to free phones for all the players, free calls home and on one occasion, a drinks reception held in their honour at the stunning Strawberry Hill resort overlooking Kingston in Jamaica.
While all this was going on, Roy Torrens, the Ireland team manager, was fielding irate calls from ICC head office, which was furious that the players were becoming so close to Digicel.
The ICC's official mobile phone sponsor was Hutchison and Digicel, said the man in the ICC blazer, was guilty of blatant ambush marketing. Put another way, they were trying to associate with the event on the cheap.
Ambush - or guerrilla - marketing is a subject that has become the obsession of sports governing bodies to the detriment of the paying fans.
For example, as they went in to the Sabina Park stadium in Jamaica, many Irish fans who were wearing the green shirt of the national soccer team were told by gun-wielding guards to remove them. Why? Because the shirt carried the Eircom logo on the front. Likewise, I saw children forced to leave bottles of water and cans of Coke in a bin outside the ground because Pepsi was sponsoring the event.
Inside there was all the branded water and Pepsi you could drink, at extortionate prices. This is becoming a regular feature of major sporting events. Earlier in the year, a butcher in London was asked to take down sausages from the front of his shop because they were in the shape of the five Olympic rings.
The nub of the issue for governing bodies, such as the GAA, the IRFU and the FAI, is exclusivity. Sponsors are paying large sums to get access to inventory such as the national shirt or the image of the players. This is a promise though that is increasingly hard to keep: ambush marketing is becoming ever more sophisticated.
The cynical among us, including, I'm sure, a good few working the corridors of FAI sponsor Eircom, suspect O'Brien's motives. What's the difference between O'Brien paying Giovanni Trapattoni's wages as Ireland team boss and Sir Allen Stanford wanting to support cricket in the Caribbean? One for the lawyers.
