Botham’s beef over not enough cricket is latest broadside in ever-earlier Ashes silly season | Emma John – The Guardian

Lord Beefy has ruffled feathers with his comments on England’s schedule and he has a point – just not the one he thinks he’s making
It was a shock to hear, this week, that Ian Botham had launched a new podcast. But only because I had assumed he already had one. It seemed impossible that the life peer was the last purveyor of strong opinions to have no permanent platform on Acast. Perhaps he has simply been too content to vent: after all, Brexit is a triumph and cricket is racism-free.
But perhaps he was cannily waiting for the dadcasting trend to peak and usher in the age of the granddadcast. This new venture with his old Question of Sport buddy Bill Beaumont will, undoubtedly, appeal to a certain demographic (myself included) who grew up watching the pair josh with each other across a perennially indulgent David Coleman.
In that sense, the show practically commissions itself, even if the title – Old Boys, New Balls! – seems rather anonymous (and, since the ICEC report, we all know how Botham feels about anonymity). Was “The Rest is Balls” already taken? Or maybe dub it “Lord Botham and Sir Bill” to entice Radio 4 listeners hoping for a previously undiscovered medieval epic.
In the first episode, the knighted pair jousted comfortably over topics such as the Women’s Rugby World Cup and the Ashes touring schedule. Botham expressed his concern that England’s only competitive warm-up match in Australia will be against their own A side, and that fixtures with state sides are no longer played. “They are saying we play too much cricket. I don’t think you play enough.”
The suggestion that England risk showing up at the first Test underprepared is not an unfair or even a new one. While non-Test fixtures have been understandably rationalised on recent tours – there were five matches in 2017-18, four against Cricket Australia XIs – it was only Covid that ended them entirely.
Still, Botham’s comments made headlines, less because of his argument and more because he said the lack of preparation “borders on arrogance”. Which, in the context of an Ashes series – whose tradition dictates that all Poms are haughty moralisers – rings out like a round of friendly fire.
Five weeks out from the Ashes opener in Perth, we are stepping into the white heat of what we like to call the phoney war. This has always been how, traditionally, we fill the dead time between the end of an English cricket season and the first ball of the first Test – seasoning our own fruitless speculation with the biased opinions and outright animosity of the players and ex-players involved. Matt Prior @ing Nathan Lyon. Kevin Pietersen declaring John Buchanan a nobody.
It is the cricket-pages equivalent of the so-called silly season, when parliament closes for its August holiday and people must find other ways to fill an infinite digital newscape. In such circumstances we can all be hugely grateful to live in a peak-podcast world where so many players and pundits have a contractual obligation to say the first things that come into their head for at least 40 minutes on a weekly basis.
In the old days, reporters were obliged to go and source this content themselves, by asking leading questions and whittling bland answers into spiky soundbites. Today, Jos Buttler can invite his mate Justin Langer into the studio for a chat and get him to wonder aloud whether England have the killer instinct to close out victories.
This week David Warner has predicted a 4-0 victory for the home side and Stuart Broad has done Stuart Broad things by calling the Australia team the worst in 15 years. The latter added that England players should take Rob Key’s advice and “just shut up” to avoid winding up the Australian media and crowds. “We don’t need England players coming out with anything too outlandish or lairy,” said Stuart “void series” Broad.
And this is only the latest stuff. Like Christmas, the phoney war seems to start earlier every year. We were still in January when the Australian media managed to manufacture an entire week of coverage from a single line in a Guardian column that compared Sam Konstas with Raygun.
Sign up to The Spin
Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers' thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week’s action
after newsletter promotion
Even those levels of outrage couldn’t compare with the headlines that followed the end to the drawn fourth Test against India this July, and some relatively graceless England behaviour. Pommy England Expose Bazball Hypocrisy. The Bazball Boys Will Be Hateable This Summer.
But what’s particularly strange about this year’s Ashes buildup is that the bulk of it is taking place when England are about to play six white-ball games against New Zealand. Almost all of the discussion around the Twenty20s and one-day internationals – outside the host country, at least – has been about various England players’ fitness before the Ashes or whether Jacob Bethell can use the games to press a claim for the Test No 3 spot.
Harry Brook said on Thursday that there will be no Ashes chat in the dressing room. But good luck keeping it out of the press conferences. No doubt the Black Caps will take the inevitable Ashes questions in their stride – they have been the warm-up act before, including in 2015 when Brendon McCullum held Alastair Cook’s side to a draw in a two-Test series. But the fact there’s so little English fan interest in these meaningless bilateral white-ball series does seem further proof of how out-of-whack international scheduling has become.
Which means, perhaps, that Botham has a point, just not the one he was making. He says England do not play enough cricket, a point impossible to argue for given the packed international schedule and the very fact they are in New Zealand now. Nor can you deny a sound logic behind England’s preparation game against the Lions, a method that can guarantee a competitive opposition while enabling workload management and game-planning behind closed doors.
If Botham sniffs something arrogant, it is probably the cricket administrators’ belief that they can have their cake and eat it – a greedily crammed international schedule that nevertheless maintains that every prize event, from an Ashes series to a T20 World Cup, deserves our attention. The problem is that they haven’t been proven wrong yet.

source