THE DEBATE: Should warm-up football be shown the red card?

Sam Billings, Peter Moores and Julian Guyer have their say on whether the beautiful game should get the boot...

Sam Billings, Kent captain

You can get injured walking down the stairs. Football gets you warm, it is good fun, it gets the camaraderie up and creates a great buzz among the lads for sure. There are 15 competitive blokes out there and you want to score the winner and be voted MVP and be the first pick the next day!

It is a mental thing too. One of the keys to sport is switching on and our daily football match certainly does that job better than any other activity you can do. Rory McIlroy got injured playing football a few years ago and he said: “Well I’m not going to change it, I could get injured doing anything.”  If people were getting injured every week playing football then obviously there would be an issue but it’s so rare.  We enjoy it, it is a great warm-up, it is what we do. I’d certainly want to continue doing it during the World Cup.

^{Billings and Alex Hales battle for the ball}

Peter Moores, Notts head coach

We do it at Notts. It is part of the ritual of getting ready. It is a good warm-up and it creates a bit of banter between the lads – it is a camaraderie thing that we imagine helps our eventual performance.

It is not the most dangerous activity we do but it becomes more tricky when it becomes linked to being the ‘thing we do’ when we play well – in other words part of the essential routine – you know how superstitious a lot of professional sportsmen are! You get twitchy as a coach if it becomes too competitive.

As the salary levels and consequences of what we do go up, how we look after our players becomes more significant. It has to be policed well – the guys have to play responsibly. If you are going to remove it then take it out for good – not just for the big games.

Julian Guyer, cricket correspondent, Agence France-Presse 

Jonny Bairstow’s ankle injury in Sri Lanka was the definition of an accident waiting to happen.

Ever since Joe Denly suffered a knee injury when tackled by Owais Shah at The Oval in 2009, I have repeatedly bored my colleagues in cricket press boxes bemoaning the folly of warming up by playing football, especially on the morning of a match. There are, after all, enough ways for cricketers to injure themselves training in essential skills.

The notion that restoring the regular kickabout has been central to England’s rise to the top of the one-day world rankings seems to be what the philosophers would call an error in causation and the lawyers an ex post-facto justification given the Test side are as keen on this as their limited-overs brethren and their results have not improved to the same extent.

^{"It is good fun, it gets the camaraderie up and creates a great buzz"}

This is not about ‘wrapping players up in cotton wool’ or a snobbish disdain for football – I’m a Portsmouth fan as it happens. 

The point is that, even with tackling banned, although you often see England cricketers challenging each other for the ball, it exposed them to an additional risk of injury that seems all too easily avoidable.

To put it another way, you don’t see anyone having a net at Wembley or Twickenham, do you?