County matches, he said, are watched by ``30 people'' so England cricketers freeze when they get a big Test crowd. Well firstly, the England middle-order which lost six second-innings wickets for nine runs at Lord's had 213 caps between them, so inexperience of a large crowd was hardly the reason for their capitulation; and secondly, county membership and gate receipts for county cricket actually rose last year.
An instant later we were told that it is a ``fact of life'' that when a team like England keep losing, no one will come and watch them. The ``fact'' actually is that England have not won a five-match or six-match match series for 11 years, yet Test crowds are excellent (in numbers if not always in behaviour) and far higher than when Botham was at his prime.
Having lamented the huge gap between county and Test cricket, the great all-rounder, confronted with the latest first-class batting averages, said how good it was that so many players were doing well and creating a healthy competition for places in the England team. Now, it is not easy to make perfect sense when rain intervals are being filled on the air and my concern is not to criticise Botham but to defend county cricket, for all its imperfections, from the undue criticism it often gets.
Botham was right, no doubt, to say the standard of international cricket has risen, but it was always a big step up from county to Test cricket: even Alec Stewart, so often a commanding Test player, needed 10 innings after his debut in 1990 to score a Test fifty, and 26 to make a hundred.
The decline in crowds can be exaggerated, too: the county game has only paid its way, and played to consistently big crowds, in brief periods, notably after the Second World War. County crowds are bigger than they are for Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia or the equivalent first-class competitions in the West Indies and South Africa. The unfailing law everywhere in the world is that the more international cricket is played and the more it is marketed, the faster the stock of the bread and butter domestic game falls.
England is the only country which sustains a fully professional circuit. The balance of matches played needs fine-tuning to adapt to the realities of life elsewhere in the world but this season's generally poor attendances, and the relative failure of experiments with night matches and late starts to championship games, have largely been due to the weather.
Scotland had a notable triumph over Worcestershire in the NatWest first round last week, but the minor counties were whitewashed by major ones; as they have been, with the exception of one match reduced by rain to a bowl-out, for 10 years. That is as it should be: professional sides, playing or practising most days in the week, ought to defeat amateurs, whatever the relative distribution of God-given talent.
The gulf between the amateur and professional games has at least been tackled by the initiatives taken in league and county second XI cricket this season. The one between county and Test cricket is even harder to solve. The jury is still out on how much of their time professionals should be devoting to match play and how much to practice, training and rest. But those inclined to exaggerate the shortcomings of county cricket, not excluding the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Lord MacLaurin, are playing a dangerous game. The principle of quality before quantity has to be right, but if you reduce the quantity too much, other sport fills the void and cricket is in danger of losing the audiences it still has.
Undeniably, county cricket in this rainy season has so far been as stable as a drunkard on a tight-rope. The fact that the busiest weekends of championship cricket coincide with Test matches makes no commercial sense and does not please the chairman of selectors (and chief executive of the Professional Cricketers' Association) because it is often the case that several of the players whose form the selectors want to assess before choosing a team do not have games.
It is primarily the England cricketers - because of their year-round schedule and the need to keep sharp for the Tests and internationals which underwrite the whole structure of the professional game - who need special rest and preparation. The popular panacea, a two-divisional County Championship, will not help them because the regular England men only play about 10 championship games as it is. In the new issue of The Cricketer, Richie Benaud echoes the judgment of another shrewd Australian, David Boon, by warning against two divisions: ``I would much prefer the championship to remain as it is,'' he writes.
But in the same magazine a letter-writer, Thomas Robson, comes up with a workable alternative which provides the main solutions of more time for practice, more 'high quality' games, more 'television-friendly' first-class matches and less danger of counties being permanently downgraded.
This may sound complicated but it is not. The proposal is for a super league of six counties and two parallel feeder conferences of six counties each. The super league teams play each other home and away; conference teams play the other 11 counties, the points scored counting towards a place in their own conference. The bottom three super league counties are relegated. Play-offs between those finishing second and third in the two conferences determine the third promoted county. The County Championship is itself decided by a best-of-three-match play-off of the top two teams in the super league.
A league is a league and play-offs are therefore spurious, but there has to be an awareness of commercial realities and football has proved how much club supporters will follow a side with a chance of winning a trophy or gaining promotion. It would leave the county finishing third in the super league and those finishing either top, or from fourth to sixth in their conferences, with only 11 Championship games in a six-month season. But the idea has obvious television potential and with a 50 per cent turnover of teams each season in the top league it avoids the possibility of the richest clubs dominating. I much prefer it to the straight two-divisional scheme.