People said ITV would never deliver a World Championship for Lewis Hamilton - that it didn't have what it takes, that it would come close, like last year, but then bottle it in the final race. So much for the doubters.

As James Allen, the commentator, glowingly put it: “You will never see a more dramatic conclusion to any motor race, let alone a World Championship” - words that, one couldn't help feeling, were aimed slightly at the BBC, which will take over the Formula One coverage next season, and which could be roughly translated as: “Follow that, you bastards.”

In all honesty, I think the BBC may manage to witness again the sight of someone in a grand prix stealing fifth place off a car wearing the wrong tyres. It was that the World Championship was at stake that gave it that extra frisson and those particular circumstances may, indeed, be unrepeatable, even for a publicly funded corporation.

As an ecstatic (and presumably quite relieved) Hamilton jumped into the arms of his pit crew, Martin Brundle asked permission to “steal three seconds” to thank everyone who had worked on ITV's Formula One coverage over the past 12 years. Thankfully, he elected not to list them individually (“... Frank, the headphone technician in the 2004 season, who was then succeeded by Dave, plus, of course, Monica and Sylvia in make-up, and anyone else who knows me”). But he did commend them all on being “really creative” and wound up by saying: “Well done, everyone. Well done, Lewis Hamilton.”

Moving words, and quite right, too. ITV has been creative and Brundle himself has been as creative as anybody. But was this the time? Was anybody at home all that bothered about saying goodbye to ITV, in all its creativity, at that precise moment? Which sounds harsh and unappreciative, I know, but we had just witnessed an astonishing piece of motor racing and the crowning of a British world champion and, unfortunately, the collateral effect of that was to make ITV the equivalent of David Coulthard. It picked the wrong day to retire. It was buried news. It's a tough business.

Did you notice how no one mentioned the prize-money? Unlike at the Stanford Super Series, where nobody talked about anything else. Actually, that's not quite true. Some people tried to talk about other things. Before the match, Samit Patel, who would go on (incredibly) to be England's top-scoring batsman, said: “At the end of the day, it's about playing for your country.”

As Remembrance Sunday approaches, how proud and reassured one was to think that there were men such as this, who were prepared to lay it on the line for the nation whenever $20million (about £12.5 million) was at stake.

Yet how prescient Patel's words were. At the end of the day, for those England players, “Twenty20 for $20million” really was about playing for your country, and sweet all else. Even now one struggles to get to the bottom of England's pub team-style capitulation. Was it an almost comical failure of nerve? Or was it a bold rearguard action on behalf of good taste?

“A county dressing-room is always full of jealousy,” Nasser Hussain had said, seeming to give warning of ruinous divisions across the English game if a few players came back covered in Texan money. Spared that, at least.

Sky Sports had the opportunity to hold the event at arm's length, gingerly pinched in an extra-long pair of laundry tongs, but chose instead to embrace it like a prodigal son, with David Lloyd hopping excitedly from foot to foot and calling it “a jamboree, a carnival, a pantomime” and publicly promising to buy himself a black bat to remember the occasion by.

“The expectation is off the scale,” Ian Ward, the presenter, said. The former England batsman was later filmed inside a Ferrari dealership to illustrate the kind of baubles this level of prize-money could buy, just in case any of us were finding it hard to imagine.

One was disappointed to see the toss conducted, as usual, with a solitary coin rather than with a crate of dollar bills jacked up on a forklift truck, or even with a one-arm bandit, but I suppose some traditions are bigger than any individual's desire to change them.

Still, it dawned on one, rather pleasingly, that several of the Stanford Superstars had gone away with $1million having neither bowled nor batted. That's hefty remuneration for picking your nose at long leg for an hour and a half or so. Little wonder the home fans were singing: “Can we play you for $20million every week?” (OK, they weren't, but they should have been.)

“You have to remember,” Allen Stanford solemnly told Sky, “I didn't invent cricket.” A handy reminder, there, for anyone whose sense of history had been dizzyingly cracked for six under the Antiguan lights.