Funny old game, cricket. Or maybe, funny new game. Once upon a time you played for your province and, if you were good enough, your country.

You didn't, as Brendon McCullum is now doing, play for Otago and New Zealand - and Kolkata and New South Wales.

There is a heavy smell of money dogging cricket these days and let me get the disclaimer out of the way quickly. There's nothing wrong with talented people earning truckloads of moolah and I'd do the same if only I could - yes, yes, yes. But there's something here that doesn't sit right.

McCullum earned his stripes with that blazing, glorious, record-setting 158 not out off only 73 balls for his IPL Twenty20 team, the Kolkata Knight Riders. He has a long and lucrative career ahead of him if the IPL continues to survive, showering its players with vast amounts of cash.

Heavy-handed billionaire Sir Allen Stanford made English cricket a laughing stock with a garish display of vulgar wealth, flying into Lord's with a transparent plastic case with US$20 million inside, surrounded by slobbering cricket officials. That ka-ching noise we all heard was the sound of a game selling its soul.

Stanford only came onto the scene because the English were terrified that the cash-rich IPL league would carry away their best players. His money meant they could reward them more heavily and keep their services.

Only it turned out that the beast in the backyard was at least as rapacious as the one in India. This was evidenced when Stanford was filmed flirting with, and jiggling on his knee, some players' wives and girlfriends - which seemed to indicate that those purchased with $20 million might have to drop more than a curtsy and assume a position other than a forward defensive.

Stanford said he hadn't known who the women were (strange... can build global wealth management company but is unsure of identity of woman on knee) and the whole thing was filed under Bad Taste.

McCullum's NSW sojourn could find itself in the same file. Brendon McCullum has about as much to do with NSW as my bottom.

I'd have no objection to the wee whirlwind heading off to the final of the KFC Twenty20 Big Bash Final in Australia (there are lots of opportunities here for bad chicken jokes but I will let them pass...) if it wasn't for the fact that he is supposed to be turning out for Otago in the State Shield. That's the team for whom he gloriously put Auckland to the sword in this competition last year.

The rationalisation from New Zealand cricket advanced the astonishing logic that NSW will give McCullum the chance to participate in the lucrative Champions League Twenty20 series in India if his IPL team, the Kolkata Knight Riders, don't qualify.