{"id":206051,"date":"2025-10-17T07:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T07:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/206051\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T07:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T07:41:07","slug":"bothams-beef-over-not-enough-cricket-is-latest-broadside-in-ever-earlier-ashes-silly-season-ashes-2025-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/206051\/","title":{"rendered":"Botham\u2019s beef over not enough cricket is latest broadside in ever-earlier Ashes silly season | Ashes 2025 – 26"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was a shock to hear, this week, that Ian Botham<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

But perhaps he was cannily waiting for the dadcasting trend<\/a> to peak and usher in the age of the granddadcast. This new venture with his old Question of Sport buddy Bill Beaumont<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

In that sense, the show practically commissions itself, even if the title \u2013 Old Boys, New Balls! \u2013 seems rather anonymous (and, since the ICEC report<\/a>, we all know how Botham feels about anonymity). Was \u201cThe Rest is Balls\u201d already taken? Or maybe dub it \u201cLord Botham and Sir Bill\u201d to entice Radio 4 listeners hoping for a previously undiscovered medieval epic.<\/p>\n

In the first episode, the knighted pair jousted comfortably over topics such as the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup and the Ashes touring schedule. Botham expressed his concern that England\u2019s only competitive warm-up match in Australia will be against their own A side, and that fixtures with state sides are no longer played. \u201cThey are saying we play too much cricket. I don\u2019t think you play enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 there were five matches in 2017-18, four against Cricket<\/a> Australia XIs \u2013 it was only Covid that ended them entirely.<\/p>\n

Still, Botham\u2019s comments made headlines, less because of his argument and more because he said the lack of preparation \u201cborders on arrogance\u201d. Which, in the context of an Ashes series \u2013 whose tradition dictates that all Poms are haughty moralisers \u2013 rings out like a round of friendly fire.<\/p>\n

Ian Botham and Bill Beaumont with David Coleman (centre) in their jocular Question of Sport heyday. The pair now have their own podcast. Photograph: AJ Pics\/Alamy<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 seasoning our own fruitless speculation with the biased opinions and outright animosity\u00a0of\u00a0the players and ex-players involved. Matt Prior @ing Nathan Lyon. Kevin Pietersen declaring John Buchanan a nobody.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. The latter added that England players should take Rob Key\u2019s advice and \u201cjust shut up\u201d to avoid winding up the Australian media and crowds. \u201cWe don\u2019t need England players coming out with anything too outlandish or lairy,\u201d said Stuart \u201cvoid series\u201d<\/a> Broad.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Even those levels of outrage couldn\u2019t compare with the headlines that followed the end to the drawn fourth Test<\/a> against India this July, and some relatively graceless England behaviour. Pommy England Expose Bazball Hypocrisy. The Bazball Boys Will Be Hateable This Summer.<\/p>\n

The handshake row between England and India provided plenty of grist to the Ashes buildup mill. Photograph: Stu Forster\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s particularly strange about this year\u2019s Ashes buildup is that the bulk of it is taking place when England are about to play six white-ball games against New Zealand<\/a>. Almost all of the discussion around the Twenty20s and one-day internationals \u2013 outside the host country, at least \u2013 has been about various England players\u2019 fitness before the Ashes or whether Jacob Bethell can use the games to press a claim for the Test No 3 spot.<\/p>\n

Harry Brook said on Thursday that there will be no Ashes chat<\/a> 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 \u2013 they have been the warm-up act before, including in 2015 when Brendon McCullum held Alastair Cook\u2019s side to a draw in a two-Test series. But the fact there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s preparation game against the Lions, a method that can guarantee a competitive opposition while enabling workload management and game-planning behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

If Botham sniffs something arrogant, it is probably the cricket administrators\u2019 belief that they can have their cake and eat it \u2013 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\u2019t been proven wrong yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a shock to hear, this week, that Ian Botham had launched a new podcast. But only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-206051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}