Lord Botham: England captain Ben Stokes wants to push the game to new limits… It’s exciting

Lord Botham dismisses the question as easily as swatting Dennis Lillee away into the Old Trafford stands during the greater of his two Ashes centuries in the fabled summer of 1981. 

Clearly, he has been asked before whether Ben Stokes is the first of the many England all-rounders since he graced the world game to truly deserve the label of the ‘new Botham’.

‘Look, you can’t compare yesteryear to today. It’s all so different,’ says the man who remains the greatest English cricketer of them all. ‘Put it this way, I love watching Ben play. The one thing we have in common is we both emptied bars rather than filled them!’

It is a topical point when Stokes’s England are determined to play in the same ultra-positive, fearless way that characterised Botham in his pomp.

Not surprisingly, it is a method that gains the full approval of Stokes’s chairman at Durham.

‘I didn’t expect anything else from Ben,’ Botham tells Sportsmail. ‘When you spend time with him you see he is a winner, highly competitive and wants to push the game to new limits.

‘It’s going to be exciting with him and Brendon McCullum in charge. What more could you want if you are walking into that dressing room than to see them in there?

‘It has got to be a magnificent boost. Everybody would like to play in that sort of environment and to a degree we did in my day.

‘It must be like the West Indies dressing room of the 1980s. Can you imagine walking into that? The atmosphere? I think that’s what will be happening with this England side. Guys will want to be there, they will want to be part of it and will want to play for England.’

Botham is adamant Stokes and England will not be deterred from their methods in Thursday’s second Test in Manchester despite their humbling at Lord’s last week.

‘The way England are playing is absolutely important to the future of Test cricket,’ he says. ‘Go out there and believe, with the sole object of winning the game.

‘You will lose the odd one playing like that, as we saw at Lord’s, but we have also seen already that even if they concede a big first-innings lead they can sail past it. I just think it’s a breath of fresh air.

‘I don’t think they will have any problems hitting back at Old Trafford. They have a different mentality now and let things go, they don’t hang on to negative stuff.

‘If you look at the England side of the last couple of years the mindset was so poor. I keep on thinking back to that Lord’s Test last year against New Zealand when we had a chance to chase a score down and didn’t even make an attempt at it.’

Botham, at 66, is as busy as ever even since stepping down from Sky. His wine business is flourishing. ‘Like everyone in the industry there is an issue with getting the grapes but we are looking at some new wines. I’m loving it,’ he says.

And we speak when he has just stepped into the world of technology to launch a new NFT collection. ‘It’s like a walk through my life into a virtual world, a bit like a hall of fame,’ he says. ‘It’s quite something.’

Then there is his work at Durham where, unsurprisingly, he can be found banging the drum for red-ball cricket in an ever increasing white-ball world. ‘We have to find a balance,’ he says.

‘Red-ball cricket should be played throughout the summer but at the moment we have pushed it to the fringes. We need to wake up before it’s too late.’

So what would Botham’s message be should Sir Andrew Strauss, as expected, seek to reduce the number of Championship matches in the high-performance review he is due to deliver to the counties next month?

‘That would be a massive mistake,’ adds Botham. ‘It would be bull**** to reduce the Championship. And I’ve told Straussy that to his face.’

He has been warned.

Ian Botham is unveiling his NFT collection on the world’s first metaverse protocol powered with decentralised rendering technology: t.me/beefyfinance