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’.