County cricket: Surrey see off Middlesex as Essex beat Kent

Here’s something for you to read with your morning err eggs. Barney Ronay on Ian ‘Beefy’ Botham’s latest missive. Food for thought, especially for Durham you’d think…

Which is all fine and evidence, in the most entertaining sense, of the enduring question: why would anyone care what Ian Botham says? How could it matter? This is simply Beefy, the pirate king, a maverick who doesn’t live by “the rules”, who says that’s what I think of your selection policy, that’s what I think of your independent, highly detailed report into racism in cricket. It is, despite the best efforts of the bridleway-blocking BBC bubble, still a free country.

All of this probably explains why Botham’s surprisingly angry verdict on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s recent bombshell report passed without a great deal of comment this week. Botham, who tells it like it is, was speaking on the Up Front podcast to Simon Jordan, who, in similar vein, tells it like it pertains indubitably to exist in a state of current beingness.

The key takeaway was that Botham is absolutely furious about the carefully sourced, highly detailed independent report, which found “deeply rooted and widespread forms of structural and institutional racism, sexism and class-based discrimination”, which confirmed emphatically the findings of the England and Wales Cricket Board’s first such report as long ago as 1997, which reflected exactly the separate testimony of people at all levels over the last three years of heightened attention. But which is, in Botham’s opinion, “nonsense” plus “a complete and utter waste of money” that has “definitely got it wrong”; a state of unshakable certainty he reached by reading “bits of it” before “throwing it on the floor”.