The Flintoff phenomenon
Michael Henderson talks to the sporting hero who is set to lift England’s hearts at the Oval Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ But when it comes, as it has this summer, what joys fly upon its wings. As the fifth and final cricket Test against Australia takes place at the Oval this weekend, the whole kingdom, it seems, is one with Shelley. Should England, who are 2–1 to the good, win or draw, they will regain the Ashes, the little urn that symbolises the longest-running rivalry in international sport, and banish 16 years of humiliation.
Since Australia won the first Test at Lord’s by 239 runs, to confirm the masterservant relationship they have come to take for granted, England have hit back with a ferocity that has startled the tourists, winning the Tests at Birmingham and Nottingham, and coming within a wicket of success in Manchester on a day when 20,000 people were turned away from Old Trafford. That was the day when the noncommitted, not just cricket-lovers, realised that this series was one in a hundred. Since then the old bat-and-ball game has been the talk of the nation.
As Michael Vaughan, England’s excellent captain, is fond of reminding questioners, it has been a communal effort. But one man has come to represent England’s rising fortunes. Two months ago Andrew Flintoff, the 27-year-old Lancashire all-rounder, had never bowled or faced a ball against the Australians, who in the course of winning eight successive series against England had grown tired of hearing how ‘next time’ the sides meet it will somehow be different. They are wiser now. Flintoff is not just the cheerful face of English cricket, and a clear favourite to win the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award, but possibly the most popular man in England. In Vaughan’s estimation, he has become ‘a sporting hero’.
‘It’s going well, isn’t it?’ says Flintoff, who remains touchingly unaffected by his growing reputation. ‘The interest has surprised us all. In the street, in the pubs, all people want to talk about is the cricket. Everywhere you go they know who you are. But there are other things I’m not so happy about, the press camped outside my house and photographers following me and the missus in cars. They even had the players’ houses in one of the papers. Did you see that?’
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If they are looking for scandal, they won’t find it in the Flintoff household. Shane Warne, Australia’s master leg-spinner, spoke for all who know the man when he said, ‘You won’t hear a bad word said about Freddie.’ Flintoff is happy to reciprocate. ‘Warney is not only a great cricketer but also a great bloke. After every match the Australians have come to our dressing rooms. One night we were supping pints until ten o’clock! I’ve learnt a lot simply by listening to people like Warne. I hope people don’t forget, just because we are 2–1 up, that these Australians are still a great side.’ Yet England are getting there, too, with Flintoff as their talisman. It is not just that he has contributed 322 runs and 19 wickets to the series, though those are A-plus performances. What has endeared him to the crowds is the sheer daring of his cricket. Having failed with the bat at Lord’s, he played at Birmingham with the carefree manner of a blacksmith enjoying an afternoon on the village green, smiting eight sixes in his two innings (a record for Ashes Tests) and then bowling with a withering compound of hostility and control. According to Graham Gooch, the former England captain, he is now ‘the best fast bowler in the world, which makes him the most valuable player before you even consider his batting’.
‘I think I put too much pressure on myself before Lord’s,’ Flintoff says. ‘A lot had been made of the fact that I had never played against Australia, and I may have been too keen to do well, too tense. Afterwards I went with the family to Devon and realised that my best plan was to stick with what I had been doing for the past couple of years, to play with enjoyment and no fear of failure. I tried to hit myself back to form at Edgbaston, then at Old Trafford I tried to bat more sensibly, if you like, and it all clicked at Trent Bridge.’ It was at the end of the Birmingham Test, when England scraped home by two runs, that Flintoff supplied the most vivid image of the summer. After celebrating with his team-mates he found time to console Brett Lee, the Australian fast bowler, whose batting had taken his side to the cusp of an improbable victory. ‘Well played,’ said Flintoff. ‘Mate,’ Lee replied, ‘you’re a supreme athlete.’ Great sportsman that he is, Flintoff also has an old-fashioned decency. We have become so familiar with the tiresome procession of loutish, preening, perpetually indulged footballers that his chivalry stands out like a good deed in a naughty world. It’s not just the footballers, either. Andy Murray, the 18-year-old Scottish tennis player, began his first major overseas tournament in New York last week by commending the ‘rock’n’roll atmosphere’ of Flushing Meadow. For showing others that real achievement in sport does not have to be accompanied by shrillness and self-regard, Flintoff is performing a noble service.
But first he must help defeat the Aussies one more time. Since 1989, when they regained the Ashes at Old Trafford on the day that 14 England players, who had been plotting behind closed doors, announced they had thrown in their lot with an unofficial tour of South Africa that winter, Australia have been cocks of the walk. Some observers Down Under began to doubt whether, in a changing game, England were actually worth a five-Test series.
It is not as if England have had no decent players. During that miserable sequence they have been able to call on batsmen as fine as Gooch, David Gower, Mike Gatting, Michael Atherton, Alec Stewart, Graham Thorpe and Nasser Hussain, and fast bowlers like Darren Gough and Angus Fraser. Yet, whichever side they fielded, they ended the series chastened. Only now, with the steady maturing of a younger, less hidebound team led by Vaughan and coached by the Zimbabwean Duncan Fletcher, has the balance shifted.
Exposed to Test cricket as a slightly gawky 20-year-old, Flintoff did not find his feet at first. He carried too much weight, lost form as easily as he found it, and picked up a succession of injuries that fast bowlers can do without. Then, one day in 2001, he was taken to one side by his Lancashire team-mate and future agent Neil Fairbrother, and gently pointed in the right direction. The improvement in form, fitness and attitude, slow at first, has been evident in the past two years, and the superb century he made at Trent Bridge was the work of a sportsman who has found his true range.
Flintoff has also helped to unite town and gown in the dressing-room. Traditionally England teams have found their most graceful strokemakers from the public schools Dexter of Radley, Cowdrey of Tonbridge, May of Charterhouse, and Gower of King’s, Canterbury, captains all. Shades there of the cravat, the striped blazer, the summer lawn, and the clink of glasses. The fast bowlers have come from the north — Larwood, Voce, Trueman, Statham, Tyson, now Harmison, players who enjoyed a fag and a gargle, and never pretended they were officer class.
Like his great predecessor, Ian Botham, with whom comparisons are no longer absurd, Flintoff is the team’s binder of talents, its beating heart. He has a generosity of spirit that extends to team-mates, opponents and anybody who meets him. Married to Rachael, with a daughter, Holly, who celebrated her first birthday this week, the Lancashire lad has settled cosily into rural life in Cheshire, an hour’s drive from Preston, where his parents, Colin and Susan, still live. His tastes are simple. He still goes home to drink with those he grew up with. He listens to Sinatra in the car. Despite his ear-stud, an appendage usually associated with the roundball game, he prefers rugby to football. He’s a modest champion.
When England’s rugby players won the World Cup two years ago, beating Australia, the world champions, on their own soil, the nation rejoiced. Martin Johnson, a rugged captain, and Jonny Wilkinson, whose boot landed the trophy, became heroes, but the prize was achieved in a grim sort of way because the team, at least six months past its best, used attritional means to reach the summit. That is not to diminish the performance, merely to put it into context. They were disciplined, they were relentless, and they fully earned their reward.
England’s cricketers have been anything but attritional in their treatment of this mighty Australian side. They have played cricket in the thrilling way that we like to imagine ourselves playing in bright morning dreams. They have hit mighty sixes, knocked stumps out by bowling at 90mph, held catches of stunning brilliance (and missed a few dollies) and generally given the impression that there is nothing else in the world they would rather be doing. Spectators, dazzled by an audacity they have never seen before and appalled by the antics of those who represent England at another sport, have taken the players to their hearts.
Whatever the stage, the greatest performers carry their own invisible spotlight, but in Flintoff’s case it is all too visible at the moment. Like Julien Sorel in The Red and the Black, he has that rarest of qualities, ‘the sacred fire with which one makes oneself a name’. And, as the Australians have found out, and may find out once more at the Oval, fire burns.
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