Ian Botham says England will win the Ashes
Ian Botham’s been doing his bluff overconfidence thing again:
“What I’ve seen so far, I don’t see as too much of a threat and if England’s bowlers stay fit then they’ll win the series.”
This is why Ian Botham was a brilliant cricketer. He lets a few facts seep in, but not enough to divert him away from the path of supreme confidence.
We saw the path of supreme confidence once. We cut across it at 90 degrees precisely. We also tripped at the crucial moment so as to make no contact with the path itself. Then we got lost in the thicket of extreme doubt where a snake of anxiety bit us on the arse.
The problem is that while Australia’s bowling attack has looked mediocre, they’re playing in India. Their bowlers aren’t suited to Indian conditions and nor have any of them really played there much before.
We’ve said ourself that Australia’s bowling attack’s worse than it was, but let’s each round up some horses and hold them, as they say. Why we do this, we don’t know, but equine grippage is a necessary step when drawing conclusions from relatively small amounts of sample data.