Freddie Redux

Last night the Beeb screened another of Peter Morgan's dramas about Tony Blair, this one about the 'special relationship' between TB and Bill Clinton. In an early scene, just after Blair had become PM, Hilary Clinton told him at dinner to plan his own legacy right away. 'If you don't', she said, 'then they'll start doing it for you'.

It's advice that doesn't only hold true for Tone, who gave it his best shot [and continues to do so...]. Andrew Flintoff's legacy has been much in the news this week, and it's been interesting to note how equivocally he's been written about. There has barely been a column without a pointed mention of the big lad's love of an endorsement or a quid. Michael Vaughan - Brearley to Fred's Botham [sort of] - conceded too that Fred had been 'difficult to captain' post-2005.

Flintoff exists in an age where his sporting legacy lives on separately. A few years of insipid reality TV shows might dilute the potency of his everyman appeal.

But cricket will, I think, be kind. There was a little hubris at the end, and a little too much awareness of his image, but for the wholeheartedness of his endeavours he will be loved.

Fred bowled the single best over I've ever seen, at Edgbaston in '05. It's been summoned in almost every elegy this week, but what's not often drawn is its context, and context, in these things, is everything.

The narrative of the series was not yet established. England were still England. Australia were still immortal. England had been drubbed at Lord's. They'd come back spiritedly on first innings at Edgbaston, but a second innings collapse, resisted only by Fred who got 70-odd, set Australia 282 to win.

Hayden, ego not yet brought low by Hoggy and Jones, and Langer ripped at Harmison and Hoggard. They had 40-odd on the board in no time. It was very much business as usual - 240-ish to win, 10 wickets in hand, a customary 2-0 lead in sight.

That Flintoff over was his first of the innings. How remarkable. Perhaps he'd already got inside Langer's head, who knows? [JL would later be unusually effusive about Flintoff, but not yet]. Whatever, he went around the wicket, got some bounce and Langer played on. It was what happened next that made things extraordinary. He squared Ponting up, cast doubt where there was none. He bowled a no-ball on the sixth delivery. Ponting must have wanted to tell the umpire not to bother. Then the last ball, flickering away, Punter's bottom hand steering his edge at it, and oblivion. Perfect.

You can make a good case for the series turning on that moment. You can make a good case for Flintoff's second life beginning there. Freddie made it happen without knowing that he had. Now he just has to deal with it. Great over though... in context.

Andrew Flintoff: 21st Century Schitzoid Man

'Two Andy Gorams.... There's only two Andy Gorams' sang the fans when the former Scotland goalie - and useful cricketer - was diagnosed with a mild form of schizophrenia. The Barmy Army may never have the chance to sing Andrew Flintoff's name again, but there are at least three versions of Freddie to consider now.

There is Flintoff the cricketer, who played like we all wanted to play, with heart and without fear, full-blooded and noble, uncomplicated. That is a loss worth marking, a hole hard to fill. There is Flintoff the commodity, frontman for Red Bull and Dubai. And somewhere in there is Flintoff the man, slightly more complex than portrayed, a character with a natural common touch, yet a fellow aware of his worth and willing to create and exploit his own iconography.

Injured and laid low, Flintoff can do little more with his cricketing life. Now it is all about his second life, his afterlife, and that has already begun to colour his reputation. A growing ambiguity towards him has been noticable in the press. The spin that now surrounds Flintoff has, like most spin, become counter-productive.

As Mike Selvey noted yesterday in a spiky column, announcements of Flintoff's injury travails are now routinely preceded by a story concerning one huge deal or another with a far-flung cricket team. On the radio this morning, Michael Vaughan, who shares Flintoff's management company, was selling the latest knock as 'a little setback - he'll just have to be more patient'.

The truth is that Flintoff is more likely not to play again than he is to become the nebulous freelance cricketer that his management company have modelled for him. Ironically, there would be a much greater weight of support behind Fred if they just came out and admitted it. We could understand his eagerness to have us drinking Red Bull more readily then. Instead, he looks as hapless and uncomfortable as Ian Botham did when me met that bloke who was going to make him the next James Bond and he was forced to parade around in a ludicrous striped blazer talking about Hollywood.

There is sadness for Flintoff the cricketer, resentment towards Flintoff the corporate construct. It's only his management that can't see it.

Champs

TMS had the actor Jim Carter as the lunchtime guest yesterday. He's also the president of Hampstead Cricket Club, and he told a great little anecdote about Andrew Flintoff, who had just been down for a benefit game.

Fred had been told not to play because of his knee, but went into bat nonetheless to face a 15 year-old leg spinner. To cheers, he studiously blocked out the first ball, before launching a crowdpleaser into the surrounding streets from the next. From the third, he knocked up a catch, walked down the wicket, shook the young man's hand and then took off his shirt and signed it for him.

It reminded me a bit of Davis Miller's great magazine piece My Dinner With Ali, in which Miller, a champion kickboxer who'd idolised the Greatest all his life, got to spar with Ali on his front lawn after a chance meeting. Miller was disappointed at first at Ali's lack of speed and clumsiness until he later caught sight of Ali shadowboxing secretly and alone, his fists and feet moving with blurring speed. Miller realised that Ali had just wanted him to enjoy his moment with the champ.

Twilight of the gods

So, this is how it's ending... Patrick Kidd caught up with Andrew Flintoff this week, and it was hard not to feel that the world has moved very slightly away from the big fella.

This can't have been the life he foresaw as a young and uncomplicated lad; the last of his playing days being seen out in the exile of Dubai, a city that, it's too tempting not to point out, now glitters with unfulfilled promise. He couldn't, he says, find a bar that was showing England's T20 final, so he had to catch the highlights the next morning on the TV at the gym. He listened to the Australia-Pakistan semi on a radio in a cab. He could hardly have been more separate from it all.

He is still making the right noises about his comeback, but even if he makes it - and Fred knows it's if not when - what exactly is he coming back to? England have left him behind now, and the momentum of the T20 game as a whole is forwards. There is talk of a contract to play T20 in Australia, of the IPL next year, but what would that make him, apart from a few quid better off? A mercenary from Dubai? He played in IPL II and was by his own admission exposed.

Maybe it's sentimental to say so, but it doesn't seem fitting, or right for him. Perhaps his real end was that last day at the Oval, even if it doesn't turn out to be so. Ian Botham, who cast the longest shadow over Flintoff's career, finished up at Durham on a nondescript day, running up to bowl with his tackle hanging out, for a joke. It's not how he's remembered [thank god for that], and his real career had come to an end some time before, but he was at home, where he was loved, and it was quite funny. Better a finish like that than the soullessness that seems to be stalking Andrew Flintoff.

Andrew Flintoff: Do You Buy That?

The Wall Street Journal reported that Dubai wobbled again today, its precipitous debt mountain barely upright, its property shipping value as quickly as it once acquired it. Apparently RBS holds a huge chunk of the debt. Somehow that figures.

So all is not well in Dubai, unless of course, you're Andrew Flintoff, one of the city state's new celebrity residents. Today's Telegraph gave over plenty of space for Fred to plug 'the ideal location for a cricketer'.

'Dubai's position geographically and its amazing facilities I think will tempt more and more people to do what we've done, and move here in the next few years,' he says.

Yes, Fred, it's almost impossible to see a downside to relocating to Dubai at the moment - even if you play for Lancashire, England is 'only' a seven hour flight away.

'Andrew Flintoff has recently been appointed as a sports ambassador to Dubai' runs the sign-off at the end of the Telegraph story. You don't say.

NB: With Fred living in the gulf, does he now hold the record for being the non-Kolpak, non-overseas player residing furthest from his county?

Flintoff's Knee: more Grassy Knoll news

Events at the Wanderers prove that cock-up tends to trump conspiracy [especially when Daryl Harper has his hand on the tiller], but what are we to make of the news of Andrew Flintoff's knee, so easily buried by current events?

Because Flintoff's operation has gone so well, he's er, had to have another operation. 

'The latest update from the specialist indicates that Fred's right knee is recovering better than anyone expected following surgery for a micro-fracture,' said Mike Watkinson, Lancashire's Director of Cricket. 'It's this very positive report which has led to Fred's decision to play more than just one-day cricket for Lancashire'.

So positive that Flintoff has undergone 'a routine arthroscopy to check on the healing of his knee' - a workaday glimpse inside the joint that will take a mere six months to recover from, and involve him missing the original return dates he  set of England's ODIs in Bangladesh and the far less lucrative knockabouts in the IPL 2010. 

Indeed, it's an operation so unremarkable that Flintoff didn't bother including it on the latest progress update on his official blog, posted on December 22, let alone mention the possibility of it happening at the time of the original surgery, which came two days after the last Ashes Test.

Michael Vaughan was first to reassure the public that Fred had nothing to worry about via his stint on TMS, reassuring at least until one remembers Vaughan's position as business development manager at ISM, Flintoff's management company. 

None of which is intended as a dig at Andrew Flintoff, someone who has greatly enlivened England's cricket for a decade. Such blatant media spin reflects less well on his advisors. He's fighting for his career at the moment, and all lovers of the game will wish him well. 

Fit for purpose

Mike Selvey wrote an excellent piece for the Guardian on the concept and future of the benefit year. It's another of those anachronistic things which are good and worthy in principal and increasingly unworkable in practice.

Selvey reveals that Andrew Flintoff 'is reported to have pocketed several million pounds' during his benefit year, which included events in the well-known Lancashire town of er, Australia.

The deficiencies of a system like that hardly need pointing out, and will probably hasten the end of the idea. Selvey also highlights via his own benefit year how the less thick-skinned player feels too: 'I found it an embarrassing, humiliating, demeaning experience, tantamount to the begging bowl, and incredibly time-consuming, I'm sure to the detriment of my game'.

Yet there is flipside. Benefits inevitably encourage the county side into fixtures with club teams, for whom such afternoons are a tremendous pleasure, and a boost to membership. As a kid, one of my greatest days was the one on which Barry Richards came to town. It would be a shame to lose such closeness. 

NB: Flintoff revealed the other day that he'd signed a new deal with Lancashire. And then today said that his stated aim for a comeback against Bangladesh was 'optimistic'. Yeah Freddie, we'd worked out what kind of optimism that was. Now the bid to become the world's best one day cricketer will begin at... you guessed it, the IPL. 

NNB: On the subject of money, I've no idea how much adidas paid Sachin Tendulkar to use their bats, but I suspect after yesterday, they've already made that money back...

No excuses

'Searingly honest' is a phrase publishers love to attach to celeb autobiographies. It's sexy and it's salable. It's also a euphemism for 'I'm now going to admit to all that stuff that I denied at the time'. 

Naturally enough, it's been the key bit of blurb for Andrew Flintoff's newie, Ashes To Ashes, just the third autobiog he's managed since 2005 [Sheesh, Freddie's better than you'd think at this writing game; Amazon is also pre-selling a fourth, Good Times Bad Times: Ready For The Fightback, due for publication in October 2010 - and what a loomingly prescient title that might be...]

The whole point of an autobiography is that it's self-serving, and sporting ones are generally an unappealing gloop of false modesty and hand-wringing justification, but Flintoff's seems particularly craven, judging by the extracts on offer in the Daily Mail. 

There's the time he had 'quite a late night' on Australia Day 2007 and then 'didn't help things by having a couple of drinks on the plane' the next morning but - having been sent away from nets for not being able to throw properly - he 'wasn't as bad as Duncan said'. Fred 'wasn't going to make excuses' though, except that 'My wife Rachael had gone home and I probably needed someone to get hold of me and tell me to cut it out', and that 'I wasn't the only one... it was like being on a booze cruise'.

Then there was the time he got pissed at an England football match in Germany and gave a boozy interview to the BBC ['I had a couple of glasses of wine with lunch which must have topped up what I had the night before']; the pedalo in St Lucia ['Other people were out later than I was and I truly believe the morale of the squad had gone before then']; and the one where he missed the team bus to pay respects to the fallen at Ypres ['We had a late night. I wasn't the only one who was late down, but I was the only one who missed the bus. I'm sure if Harmy had been there, he'd have come and got me, because he knows what I'm like'].

Actually Fred, we all know what you're like. You've just brought out a book telling us. Flintoff carries with him an enormous amount of goodwill: he's not a bad guy. He is though more complex than such stage-managed mea culpas allow. The book can also be read as an exercise in media control - firstly in how the stories were originally spun, and then again as how they can later be sold. 

Stop digging...

Isn't it time that Chubby Chandler just kept quiet, if only for a few hours? Anyone would think he was trying to get some publicity for himself.

NB: Andrew Flintoff must be chuffed that the Chandler vision of his future is one of bungee jumping on saturday evening TV. Darren Gough watch out...

Sign o' the times

Andrew Flintoff has appointed his own press officer. 

Achilles' last stand

There was a revealing line in Andy Flower's interview with Mike Atherton in the Times.

'This [missing the trip to Flanders] was not a big enough thing for me to drop Andrew Flintoff. No way was it a serious enough issue to do that, to finish someone's career'.

Those words should chill Flintoff rather than comfort him.

Just like the other Manchester uber-lad Ricky Hatton, Flintoff refuses to concede the damage alcohol is doing. He's 31, persistently injured and the fine motor skills required to bat against the world's best bowlers have been eroded. 

It's not over yet, but as Flower says, it may only be a session or two away.

Geoffrey and Michael, ebb and flow

There is [if you believe Steve Harmison at least] a tendency for modern players to disregard Geoffrey Boycott. Yet here he is on Michael Vaughan today:

'Ultimately, I think his mistake was to try to play the same way for the rest of his career. Cricket is like life, it ebbs and flows, and you go through good times and bad. The trick is knowing when to eke out a gritty, ordinary half century, and when you are in terrific form and can get onto the bowlers'. 

That is just about as perfect a summary as you can get of Vaughan's last two years.

Geoffrey went on to praise Vaughan, and rightly so. His reputation in England will grow.

NB: Andrew Flintoff, however, is becoming a fucking buffoon. It's not so much that he missed the bus, it's what he missed by missing the bus that matters.

Freddie disses Fiddy, India, hotel receptionists: storm brewing

In an interesting adjunct to the post below, GQ magazine have just released some details of an interview they'll be carrying with Andrew Flintoff. The highlights:

'I have no problems with a multi-cultural society, I think it's to the benefit of the country. But you have to be careful what levels it takes you to. It annoys me when I phone a hotel receptionist in my own country and they don't understand what I am saying because they don't speak English'.

'There are places I wouldn't go to now. You see these reports of stabbings, bottlings, shootings and you think, 'what's happening to this country?' I think rap music's got a lot to do with it. It makes it sound cool not to conform and to be violent. That's why I think sport has such an important role to play. Cricket kept me away from trouble.'

'There's knife crime, gun crime, homelessness, the financial crisis, so many things need fixing. But when you go somewhere like India you realise we're not in that bad a shape. We have a tendency in Britain to talk ourselves down.'

Lucky we've got Andrew Flintoff to, er talk things back up, then...

NB: Excuse odds just in: 

Misquoted 2/1

Taken out of context 7/4

Jocular comments made in private 6/1

'I love going to India/talking to hotel receptionists/listening to rap music' 11-2

Greatest Living Yorkshireman mark iii

Were you faster than Fred Trueman?

Without a doubt. I think everyone gets faster as days go on. But it's not all about pace. Fred Trueman was a tremendous bowler.

Three guesses as to the speaker... oh alright, you'll only need one. It's the Dazzler of course, Darren Gough, in a nice interview at TWC. 

How good it would be if Fred were around to debate the matter, but as neither he nor Darren were particularly reticent on the subject of their own talents, I suspect they probably did.

The next question, of course, should have been 'so Jimmy Anderson is quicker than you, then?', but Goughy might have actually exploded before answering that one.

He's bullish on the subject of Flintoff, too: '...if he could just learn to hold the ball up a bit, he'd be so much better, but he's not a natural bowler is he; we all consider him a batsman who bowls a bit'.

Goughy doesn't enlarge on who 'we' are, but it's interesting to note Freddie's total of Test wickets - 218 - now just eleven shy of Darren's 229. 

It's taken Fred 17 more Tests though, as someone might remind you should the topic come up. 

Fake IPL player goes home*

Yes, Andrew Flintoff is on his way back. And line of the day goes to David Hopps in the Guardian: 'Getting him on the field has long been like assembling an IKEA wardrobe with half of the bolts missing'.

Hoppsy has begun the season in waspish form, unlike poor Fred. Flintoff has been exposed by the tournament: purveyor of two of the three most expensive spells in what we already love to call 'franchise history', larrupped by AB and Abishek Nayar [not a sentence you get to write too often], and maker of two of the least convincing 20-odds, most of them via edges through and over third man accompanied by sheepish, shaggy grins.  

He's been comfortably outbowled by the tournament's other most expensive acquisition, KP, who, finding himself back in South Africa, has reverted to his original incarnation as an off-spinning all-rounder. How the crowds are enjoying that. Collingwood is yet to get a game. 

On the radio yesterday, Jonathan Agnew rather sniffily asked listeners to text in if they were watching the IPL. Well Aggers, plenty did, and what they're watching is the game run away from England and English players. There have been displays of bowling skill and sustained hitting that have blazed across England's dark skies like comets. Look to the heavens boys - that's the future up there.

It's safe to say that if the England T20 side was playing in the IPL it would finish bottom, which is where it's headed this summer too. Damage limitation is the best we can hope for. The best chance for that is to give the captaincy to Dimitri Mascarenhas, who is witness to a masterclass from Shane Warne, and make sure that Bopara and Napier are given their head. 

And KP? KP should open in T20. There he could think clearly about his game.

* Not that one, obviously.

What's eating Freddie Flintoff?

'I just don't understand vegetarianism. I can't imagine not eating meat. I love beef, lamb, red meat in general. I don't really count chicken as proper meat.'

He may have been absent from the sports pages of late, but readers of the Observer Food Magazine learned all about Freddie 'Andrew' Flintoff's refuelling habits yesterday.  And what a read it was:

'When I was a twentysomething cricketer, there was no such thing as a healthy fitness routine...' [Really? Are you sure about that, Fred?] ... 'I'd eat takeaways, never cook, go out and drink as much as I wanted...' 

'Cricket suddenly stopped being a seasonal sport...' [Is this Flintoff, or have the Observer Food people got him mixed up with WG Grace?] ... 'As a kid, I ate normal food, fish fingers, peas, that kind of thing'... 'I like to have a crack at exotic food when I'm abroad, but I wouldn't touch the stuff back home...' 'The only time I crack is over Christmas. Then I eat what I want, but only because we get a very short break from training. Now that I'm concentrating on my bowling, I have to be extra fit, and so that means no more bread and pasta and probably a lot more salad...'

More sala.... Hang on. Rewind there just a little. 'Now that I'm concentrating on my bowling...'? Here is some news, from the man who last season allegedly regarded himself as 'a batting all-rounder'. 

For Fred - batting averages over his last five Test series 15.66, 28.22, 28.55, 28.00, 16.75 -  it looks like reality bites at last. 

NB: As is the way with these things, Flintoff was interviewed on behalf of his new batmaker Puma. They will no doubt be pleased by the news. 

Moving targets

England should name their XI for Antigua straight away, if only to preserve what's left of the mental health of the press.

Bell and Collingwood have been duffed up already and Harmi's a basket case anyway, so attention has shifted rather queasily to Andrew Flintoff. Lawrence Booth's case is that the giant is on the wane. Nick Hoult, with the whiff of second-hand info, says he can't play with KP.

Flintoff is not a man who will ever be flattered by statistics. Like Botham, you kind of had to be there. He is a player of great innings (albeit infrequently) and a bowler of great spells, rather than a great player. That much has always been apparent. His batting is brutal but fragile, his bowling demanding rather than deadly, and whatever the opposite of a golden arm is, he's got one. His wicket-taking is stymied by his natural length, which is slightly short for regular pitches. 

But this is old news. The world has known it for some time.

Hoult's piece is risible, and based around the three Tests since 2005 that England have won with Flintoff and Pietersen in the side. I don't know how a statistician like David Barry would describe this information: I'd call it disingenuous in the extreme. Flintoff has been injured for great swathes of it; it disregards whoever else was in the team - they probably won just as few when Flintoff has played with Vaughan, or Bell, or Harmison, or Collingwood, or Cook; it also ignores the fact that Pietersen has played in every test since 2005 - all 41 of them. 

On the list of England's problems, Flintoff and Pietersen are some way down. Unless you're reading the papers, of course.

Objects of fetish

The crash and burn of Woodworm, flash bat providers to KP and Andrew Flintoff, wasn't quite on the scale of Lehmann Bros, but just as the IPL and Stanford Super Series carry vague echoes of Kerry Packer's circus, so Woodworm immediately brought St Peter to mind.

St Peter, with their graphically beautiful SP logo, burst into the consciousness by signing one of the biggest stars of the day, Tony Greig, to front them. Greig not only used the bat but debuted the classic 'mitts', the one-piece batting gloves that became instant objects of fetish. After a century of lumpen sausage gloves (and even spikes for the nets) how sleek and 21st century were Greiggy's mitts. Club grounds were soon awash with SP bats and gloves. If I remember correctly, even King Viv had a brief SP flirtation post Jumbo and before Duncan Fearnley. Then as soon as they had arrived, they were gone (although a cursory search reveals you can still pick up SP bats in Oz).

The Batsman landed an SP from a bloke my father met on a building site. It was far too heavy for my puny early adolescent wrists but the pull of the logo was great. I used it the first time I batted through an innings (instant nostalgia: first bat I scored a fifty with was a Slazenger, first hundred with a Gray Nicolls Scoop (!), thousand runs in a season for the first time with a County: Christ I can even remember how each one smelt. The two best I ever held were a Slazenger V12 that belonged to a teammate - I was still in and using it when he came to the wicket; he was saintly enough not to demand it back at that moment - and a short-handled Jumbo in a sale at a shop in Kingston (Surrey, not Jamaica) that picked up like a wand and that I've always regretted not buying).

Selecting and using bats looms heavily in the psyche of almost every batsman (see Marcus Trescothick's recent autobiography, and Ramps' devotion to the Gray Nicolls Predator that took him to the hundred hundreds). When you pick up a bat that you're going to use, you just know. You have to be strong if it's a make you don't favour. 

KP will now front adidas's assault on the bat market, while Freddie looked like he was using Puma out in Antigua. The Batsman has met Puma's batmaker and can testify to his talent. He did, however, look up from his lathe and lament, "it all depends how good your stickers are these days..."

NB: The names of bats used to reflect their shape or heritage: Jumbo, Scoop, Signature etc. Now they're becoming as nonsensical as car brands. The adidas range are called Incurza, Libra and Pellara. Which one are you?