Stuart Law explains why we should cherish England’s talismanic all-rounder for his commitment to the cause
Just mentioning Andrew Flintoff’s name sent Stuart Law into a rage. There was no point assuring Law, his former captain at Lancashire, that the topic under discussion was Flintoff’s readiness, or otherwise, to win back the Ashes and not the missed alarm call that had brought a calamitous return into the England ranks. Law wanted to lecture England about valuing the cricketing giant in their midst.
The Ashes are finally here, Flintoff is public property again and an expectant nation is at loggerheads over whether to delight in his humanity or to suspect that his ill-timed lapse into unprofessionalism so close to the Australia series is a harbinger of doom in the Tests that lie ahead.
Law, who played one Test and 54 ODIs for Australia, and whose award of British citizenship has not brought with it a sudden taste for prevarication, sees it differently. Relish Flintoff while you can, was his message: an Australian displaying a loyalty that in England some find beyond them. If Flintoff plays half as aggressively in the first Test as Law spoke in his defence then England will go 1–0 up in no time.
“People tag people,” he said. “They do that to Freddie. He has celebrated an Ashes victory and not many Englishmen have done that. He is a young man who enjoys a beer as every young man does, but you will not see a guy work harder.
“His detractors, mate, I’d like to see them live his life for a few weeks, to do all that rehab every day to fight back from his injuries, to receive a phone call from his physio saying ‘we need you here, now’, and to put himself through it again. They couldn’t cope for more than a few minutes. Have these people never slept through an alarm? Have they never known a situation where they are in such a deep sleep that they want to sleep all day? Maybe they have never worked hard enough to experience that. People always assume the worst.
“Freddie is the most selfless man I have ever met. He doesn’t care about himself. He cares about others. He will have been distraught enough because he had let his team-mates down. I have seen him just after injury and he is destroyed, heartbroken and he feels that he is letting everybody down if he can’t play like he his supposed to. He has learned to cope with that now but it has taken him a long time.”
Law has much in common with Flintoff. England’s pre-Ashes trip to the trenches at Ypres, part of a trip to commemorate Armed Forces Day, was not the time to “stuff up”, as England’s captain Andrew Strauss put it. But the team dinner the previous night was also billed as a bonding session and, for Flintoff and his vociferous ally, alcohol remains central to that.
Law, now on a one-day contract at Derbyshire, believes that England’s Ashes worm within is not the sociable player who likes a drink, but the solitary sportsman who doesn’t. It is the loner, uncommunicative and insecure who is most likely to be fallible when the pressure is at its height. “If Freddie has had a good time then good on him. It doesn’t matter. He is a tremendous cricketer and a tremendous bloke. Modern sportsmen are getting boring. They can’t speak to people, they are too busy listening to their iPods and staring at the wall of a room.”
The reason for talking to Law had almost been forgotten – it was to reflect upon Flintoff’s Lancashire send-off, 93 from 41 balls in a Twenty20 tie against Derbyshire almost two weeks ago, his first appearance at Derby for nine years, and one where he good-naturedly spent an hour signing autographs and posing for pictures. Law had complained on Sky TV of “stopping cannonballs” at cover. “Freddie looked in good form with bat and ball and that’s good news for Freddie and it’s not good news for Australia,” he said.
For a more considered assessment of Flintoff’s likely Ashes impact, it was necessary to walk the boundary edge on a stiflingly hot evening at Trent Bridge last week where Peter Moores, looking relaxed again six months after he was sacked by England, was lapping the ground at a pace that would tax many half his age.
The first day of the Ashes series would have been the height of Moores’s coaching career had he not fallen victim to an attempted coup by his captain, Kevin Pietersen. But if Moores now might never coach an England Ashes-winning side, his work with Flintoff at Lancashire could yet win the gratitude of his successor and former assistant, Andy Flower.
At Liverpool, in the second of Flintoff’s championship outings for Lancashire last month, he arrived at the ground with Moores at around 7.30am and was hitting balls on the outfield with groundstaff and stewards hauled in as volunteer fielders. No missed alarm clock here.
Moores suggested: “He is in a good place. Having seen Fred rehab-ing when I was the England coach, I knew he worked hard. I don’t think I quite realised how hard he did work. It is a part of Fred, and other sportsmen, that we don’t see the bits that go on behind the curtain that enable them to do what they can do.
“It takes a lot of commitment. People ask is he bothered. He is. The way he has worked to get physically ready, and also the way he has explored his game, both batting and bowling, to get into the best possible readiness for the Ashes I think has been really refreshing. People always think great players rock up and play and it’s a piece of cake.” Moores discussed at length with Flintoff how he wanted to bat this summer. It was something the player referred to at Edgbaston last week. “A few years ago I tried to get technically better as a batsman,” he said. “I have almost gone back to my old way of playing. I am a naturally aggressive player with bat and ball and that is what I will be trying to do.”
The coach’s judgment is that this is not a mildly defeatist approach born perhaps of Flintoff’s recognition that he will bat as low as No7, below Matt Prior, or even of a player who suspects that his best years might now be behind him.
“I don’t think there is a limit to Fred,” Moores said. “I still think that he has some immense cricket left in him. When he hits a ball as cleanly as he did against Derby, people think it comes from brute strength. It doesn’t. He is a strong bloke with an inherent sense of timing. We see Fred take unbelievable catches. He is a big man who moves as quickly as a smaller man.
“The key is his body allows him to feel confident. That is always unpredictable. All bowlers go bust. The question is how long there is in between them going bust. All I can say is he couldn’t be in any better physical condition. Fred will be hoping that he has had his fair share of injuries and that he gets an extended run.”
Mickey Arthur, South Africa’s coach, feels that Flintoff was wasted in a controlling role against South Africa last summer. “I’d like to see him used as a more attacking option because he has the ability to do just that,” he said. Arthur suggested that Stuart Broad should be the controlling bowler, a theory that Broad might not altogether take to, and a five-strong attack with either Monty Panesar or Ryan Sidebottom bowling long, stock spells would free up Flintoff.
Moores is too polite to advise Flower. But he did predict that England can anticipate Flintoff at full throttle: “Fred doesn’t hold back a lot. You wouldn’t want that. That’s not how he plays. You want him to play full out. That’s what makes him different. He has his ability to raise his game for big games. One of the big challenges is can you get it out of you when you really want to? Fred has shown he can do that. All you want as a sportsman when you finish is that you have had a rip at it.”
This is Flintoff’s dilemma. He is urged to be a colossus on the field yet, the moment he steps back into society, the adrenalin is expected to settle of its own accord, the belligerence to be replaced by decorum, the beers to be drunk in moderation.
When he voiced how much he cared at Edgbaston last week, it came with a warning that he will buckle if it is assumed he can achieve miracles alone. “The reason you do the work is that you want to put an England shirt back on in an Ashes series,” he said. “The ultimate is the Ashes. But to beat Australia you can’t rely on just a few star names. It has to be the bulk of the side.” Everybody should drink to that.
