Old habits often die hard. And without doubt, the prospect of an Ashes battle still fuels the fire within Sir Ian Botham.
In an exclusive interview with Mirror Sport, it was put to the man whose Headingley heroics against the old enemy will forever be etched in folklore that England needed a series win, given their last came back in 2015. Sharply, he pointed out the hosts weren't the only ones needing to address a statistic.
“Equally, Australia haven’t won over here for quite a while," he said, with the tourists retaining the urn on UK shores in 2019 via a drawn series. But, intriguingly, the iconic all-rounder thinks it's the compressed schedule that could prove pivotal to the destination of the Ashes. And he implied that negligence over preparation could seriously hamper the Aussies, whose last series win on these shores came under Steve Waugh back in 2001.
