Ian Botham should take cricket’s problems more seriously

Lord Botham – chair of Durham County Cricket Club and a life peer appointed by Boris Johnson in 2020 – has challenged the findings of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report, which highlighted cricket’s elitism and class-based inequalities, as well as widespread discrimination in terms of ethnicity and gender.

Admitting that he had only read ‘bits’ of it, Botham nonetheless dismissed the report as ‘nonsense’, which he claims he ‘threw on the floor’. Ironically, the report was only published online. One assumes he has a well-stocked printer.

Botham’s main complaint seems to be that he wasn’t central to the process. ‘No one’s interviewed me, no one asked me for my thoughts’, he said. ‘I don’t know of anyone that was asked and interviewed before this report was put together’.

Yes, there’s a lot of ‘me’ and ‘I’ in there. It’s worth remembering that 4,000-plus other people from within the game did give evidence. Contributions came from people at the very grassroots of cricket, right up to the England men’s and women’s captains, including Ben Stokes, the current England men’s captain and Durham’s most illustrious player.