It is Wednesday evening at St James’ Park, Newcastle, and almost 800 people have gathered at a banquet to pay homage to Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff: ICC cricketer of the year, BBC sports personality of the year, MBE and freeman of the city of Preston.
Gabby Logan, the master of ceremonies, welcomes him to the platform and hands him a microphone. He looks the embodiment of cool in his coal-grey suit, white striped shirt and smart pink tie, but his footwear is drawing gasps from the crowd. “Is it just me, or do those scuffed brown shoes clash with that suit?” a startled diner asks. “Well, it wouldn’t be my choice,” his neighbour concurs, “but you’d have thought that he’d have polished them.”
They have just discovered the essence of being “Freddie”. The norm doesn’t apply.
Alan Shearer and Steve Harmison have joined him on the stage. He takes a sip from a glass of white wine and looks remarkably relaxed for a man who once froze on A Question Of Sport and swore he would never go back on. “It was about five years ago,” he explains, “and I was on with Andy Cole, James Cracknell and Rio Ferdinand.
“A friend I’d played cricket with was writing the questions and told me he’d look after me, but I didn’t really enjoy it. I don’t know a great deal about sport, to be honest, and probably questioned why I was there. The whole experience was a bit of a chore and I couldn’t wait for it to finish and get home.”
This is the essence of being “Andrew”. He has never craved the spotlight.
Tonight, he’s in “Freddie” mode as the question-and-answer session with Shearer and Harmison begins. Freddie the Flamboyant, Freddie the Entertainer, Freddie the Braveheart, whose chief concern is that everyone attending the function will leave thinking, “What a good night.”
“Let’s start off with a question about sledging,” Logan begins. “This comes from table 58 and it says, ‘What sort of comments do the Australians make when sledging?’ ” “The Aussies are fantastic,” Flintoff responds. “One of the best sledging stories I ever heard was from a match between Australia against Zimbabwe at the Harare sports club with Ian Healy behind the stumps. Ian is renowned for sledging, renowned for taking the mickey out of batters when he’s stood behind, and on the Zimbabwean side was a bloke called Eddo Brandes, this big, steak-eating, beer-loving Zimbabwean who farmed chickens for a living and played his cricket at weekends.
“So he comes out to bat and takes guard at the crease and Healy is at him straight away. (He adopts a course Aussie accent.) ‘Oi, Eddo! Why are you so f****** fat!’ And Eddo turns round to him and says, ‘Well, Ian, every time I go to bed with your missus, she gives me a biscuit’.”
And the room explodes with hearty guffaws.
“I think that’s a pretty good way to get us started,” Logan smiles. She then turns to Shearer. “What about football, Alan? You and Mr Keane seem to have had a few choice words with each other over the years.”
“No, there was only one,” Shearer corrects. “It was ‘wanker’, that was it. He seemed to take exception to that.”
“But it goes on in football, doesn’t it?” she presses. “You must have your favourites?” “No,” he laughs. “That was it. I haven’t got any more.”
Steve Harmison is next to the plate. The fast bowler from Ashington is the closest of the England players to Flintoff and is pressed by Logan for some insights. “Steve, you two are joined at the hip on tour,” she announces. “You were telling me earlier that Freddie has unusual sleeping habits.”
“Yeah, he don’t like the dark,” Harmison smiles.
“What!” Logan exclaims. “He’s 6ft 4in, he’s built like a proverbial brick house and he leaves the light on at night!” “He don’t like the dark,” Harmison insists.
“What’s all this about, Freddie?” Logan inquires.
“I was scarred as a child,” Freddie smiles. “There was this bloke who used live across the road and what happened was . . .”
“You’re not confusing me with Oprah Winfrey?” Logan interjects.
“No, this is a true story,” Flintoff insists. “He had one of those big cars with about 45 seats in it and he used to say to all the kids in the street, ‘If you clean me car, you can come and watch some videos’.”
He casts his gaze to a nearby table where his father Colin and brother Chris are seated. “I can see me brother nodding there,” he smiles. “He’s scarred as well.” The audience laughs.
“Anyway,” he continues, “we cleaned the car and he showed us a video and it started off quite tame with Raiders Of The Lost Ark. And we cleaned it again a couple of weeks later and I think it was Rocky next. The third film he showed us was The Exorcist. I was eight years old and when I came out of that I was on blue pills for nightmares and started wetting the bed and my life hasn’t been the same since.”
And the room just erupts.
The comedians Rory Bremner and Adger Brown — guests at Flintoff’s table — smile in admiration. They know what it takes to make an audience laugh and take to the stage shortly afterwards, lumbered with the same affliction as the hundreds of awestruck rivals who have watched Freddie this summer or followed him to the crease.
It is the essence of his genius. How do you follow that?
THE black, chauffeur-driven Volkswagen Phaeton exits the motorway at junction 6 and glides towards Hale in the leafy suburbs of Manchester. It is a cold, dark Thursday morning, a week before the function in Newcastle, and Freddie is not long out of bed when the car arrives at his door.
He is tired. Four months have passed since the Ashes celebration at The Oval and he hasn’t yet come to terms with life as David Beckham. There was the trip to Australia for the ICC World XI series, the tour of Pakistan, the Being Freddie book launch, the Official Andrew Flintoff DVD, thousands of photographs signed, endless slaps on the back, the end of simple pleasures like shopping in the January sales or buying a loaf of bread in Tesco.
On the menu today is a coaching session at a school in Oxford, a lunch with Paul Willis, the managing director of Volkswagen UK, a photo-shoot and signing session at the VW headquarters in Milton Keynes and a dinner in London. He slides his giant frame into the plush leather seats and pops a mint from the packet that the chauffeur has placed in the console with two morning papers and a copy of GQ. Call it breakfast on the run. “Good morning, Malcolm,” he says with a smile, switching on his mobile phone. “Good morning, Andrew,” the chauffeur replies. Another day in Wonderland is about to begin.
Neil “Harvey” Fairbrother, Flintoff’s friend and manager, has joined him for the trip. The two have been close since their days together at Lancashire when Fairbrother took a shine to this scrawny kid from Preston whose only ambition was to play at Old Trafford. “Harve has always been there for me since I was 16 years old,” he says.
Harve is a raving Manchester United supporter; Fred is a converted Blue. They have a corporate box organised for the derby game, but Harve isn’t confident. “Did you watch the game (the Carling Cup semi-final between United and Blackburn) last night?” he asks.
“No,” Freddie says, “I was out.”
“United were awful.”
“Yeah?” “Your neighbour got on but was almost sent off again.”
“Was there a fight?” “Naah, handbags. Rooney and Savage were at it, but it came to nothing.”
“Just as well,” Freddie laughs, “Rooney would have ripped his head off.”
We enter the suburb of Bowden and his mind returns to a frantic afternoon he once spent in a park here with his pet boxer dogs, Fred and Arnold. Why did he buy two boxers? Because he read in some book that they are “alert and sharp with a lifelong puppyish behaviour” and thought it sounded a bit like him.
So he has just taken charge of them and they’re out in the park on this gorgeous afternoon when, wild with excitement, they charge into a stream and, wild with excitement, he followed them in. Why? He can’t explain it. It just seemed a good idea at the time. He was splashing around with the dogs, and having great fun until they spotted this guy walking a golden labrador and decided to take off. He pulled himself from the stream and set off in pursuit, but the dogs were all over the guy and going absolutely mental when he finally caught up. “I had to pull the pair of them off him,” he says, “but he couldn’t have been nicer about it. ‘That’s all right mate’, he said. I looked up and it was Roy Keane. He hadn’t a clue who I was.”
“When did it happen?” I ask.
“A few years ago,” he says.
“Do you still have the dogs?” “We’re away so much that Mum and Dad look after them now. And Rachael (his wife) has enough on her plate (she is expecting their second child) without two giddy dogs. But it’s worked well, to be honest. I remember growing up, always wanting a dog, and me Dad saying, ‘I’ll never have a dog in this house’. And he’s ended up with two of them!” We join the M6 at Knutsford and traffic is dense as we head south towards Birmingham. “I could get used to being chauffeured around,” I yawn, stretching my legs and perusing The Times. He doesn’t agree. “I like driving,” he says.
“I do a lot of my running on this hill at a place called Rivington, near Bolton. It takes about an hour to drive there from the house each morning, but I love it because it’s the only time I ever get these days on my own.”
He is in “Andrew” mode: Andrew who is anxious about travelling to the school this morning because he has always been uncomfortable in crowds; Andrew who was thrilled to be in Pakistan for the BBC awards because it meant he didn’t have to stand in a studio with “all those proper sports people”; Andrew who hates to shave and who forgot the cufflinks for his shirt on the day of his wedding (Malcolm had a set in the car); Andrew who would much rather be at home now watching Soapstar Superstar with Rachael, building bricks with Holly, their daughter, or mucking around with Fred and Arnold in the park.
“I’m fascinated by your taste in radio and music,” I announce.
“You’re an Elvis fan?” “Yeah.”
“And you listen to Wogan?” “Yeah, every morning. I don’t have a CD in the car; I just listen to Wogan and Radio 2 through the day. When I left school, I worked behind the record counter at Woolworths in Preston and my taste in music started there. I couldn’t tell you who’s in the charts at the moment. I love the old ones: Elvis, Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Elton John, and don’t go outside of that.”
“What about an iPod?” “Yeah, Ashley Giles has a laptop and I usually sift through all his rubbish. But, to be honest, I don’t like sitting with earphones in the dressing room or on the bus. I’d sooner have a laugh and a chat than to be sitting there on my own, listening to music.”
“So you’re not much of a techno?” “No. I’ve got an e-mail address and I can find what I want on the internet, but that would be it as far as computers are concerned.”
I hand him the latest edition of GQ and highlight the feature on The 200 Most Powerful Men In Britain. “They’ve ranked you at No 72,” I announce, “just below Robbie Williams (69th) and above Jose Mourinho (73rd).”
“I’m not sure about that,” he says. He reads the citation and shakes his head.
“I bet you never imagined when you were working at Woolworths that you’d be the 72nd most powerful man in Britain one day,” I suggest.
“Too right,” he laughs. “I wasn’t even the 72nd most powerful man in Woolworths Preston.”
HE REMEMBERS the excitement at Greenlands primary school in Preston during the annual visit from the man from the zoo. Some years he brought a snake and others a monkey, but he never brought a cricketer. Freddie was three years old for Botham’s Ashes in 1981, seven for Gower’s success in 1985 and 10 when Gatting triumphed before the drought. How would he have felt if they had made a trip to his school? Much the same, he suspects, as the children at the school in Oxford who are firing questions at him now.
How fast are your deliveries on average? Were you always good at cricket? Who did you look up to as a cricketing hero? When did you start playing seriously? What was it like to bowl Ricky Ponting out? What do you think was your best ever innings? What’s the worst part of being famous? How heavy is your bat? Do you get nervous before a match? What were your feelings when you knew you’d won the Ashes? What’s your favourite cricket ground? How do you feel when someone gets you out? Would you like to captain England? What was it like facing Warne? Were you surprised when you won sports personality of the year? Do you like being asked these questions? He stands for 20 minutes answering patiently and spends an hour signing autographs and coaching in the nets. The adulation and impact of his visit unsettles him. “I find it hard to get my head around it at times,” he admits when we return to the car. “I went to Jumeirah College in Dubai before I went away (to Pakistan) and it was such a big thing for the school, which I find quite bizarre.
“We said before the summer that if we won the Ashes it would be a life-changing experience for all of us, but I think we’ve all been amazed by the enormity of it all. I haven’t really had time to sit back and take stock, to be honest. I’m just running with it for the moment. It’s strange.”
You ask for his most vivid memory of summer. Instinctively he is torn between The Oval and Trafalgar Square, and then he remembers Trent Bridge. “I experienced emotion that day that I have never experienced playing cricket before,” he says. “The tension was unbearable. I was out. There was nothing I could do. I sat in the dressing room; I sat on the balcony; I didn’t know where to put myself.
“I grabbed Andrew Strauss and punched him in the arm. After the game there were a few tears in the dressing room and it probably reaffirmed how much I enjoy cricket and how much it actually means to me.”
“So how can it ever get better than that?” I ask.
“I don’t know if you’ll ever get something like this (past) year. We hadn’t won the Ashes for 17 or 18 years and that’s not going to happen again, in my career anyway. It can’t get bigger than what it was, but if we can go to Australia and defend out there, it would be pretty close.
“But we can’t get too far ahead of ourselves. There’s a hell of a lot of cricket to be played before then and it would be dangerous if we start looking at Australia. Pakistan was a wake-up call; we never went there expecting to turn up and win, and knew we’d have to fight for it, but in some ways it was a reality check, a reminder of what we do. We’re cricketers. Cricket is what we enjoy and what we do. Everything else is great, but we can’t lose sight of that.”
FREDDIE time. We are back with him on stage at St James’ Park and he is fielding a question on Darren Gough and his non-selection for the tour to India. “I’ve enjoyed playing with Goughie,” he says. “When he plays for England he is the heartbeat of the team and would run through a brick wall for the side. It’s unfortunate he is not coming to India with us, but, knowing Goughie, he will still be thinking that there’s a chance of the World Cup and I ’d love him to be there. The England side is a better side when Darren Gough is in it.”
“And the post-match disco would never be the same, I imagine,” Gabby Logan suggests.
“No,” Freddie smiles. “I don’t know where he got the dancing from, to be honest. Me and him have been known to throw a few shapes in nightclubs over the years, but never the foxtrot or the tango! He was very good; bordering on camp, but very good.”
“Okay,” Logan says, “this is a question for the whole panel: ‘Bearing in mind Andrew’s outstanding display of sportsmanship towards Brett Lee during the Ashes, does the panel believe there is enough sportsmanship in sport?’ ” Harmison is quickest to the microphone. “Can I stop that one,” he says. “Ten balls before the end of the game he hit him (Lee) on the head twice, and on the arm and on the glove when he dropped his bat. So I’m not sure I’d call it sportsmanship.”
The spotlight turns to Freddie and suddenly our hero has a problem. Should he oppose his friend and tell it as it was? That the sentiments he expressed that afternoon to Lee were totally genuine? That the respect between the sides and the beers shared in the dressing room after each Test were what made the series so special? Or should he smack Harmy for six and send the crowd home screaming? “Well,” he smiles, unable to resist. “I must admit that when I put my arm around him the exact words I used were ‘It’s 1-1, you Aussie bastard.” And the roof almost lifts. The session ends and as he exits the stage, the thought occurs that he has begun the new year exactly where he spent most of the last — with the crowd on their feet cheering his name and begging for more.
