Just when Andrew Strauss was trying to forget the disastrous fourth npower Test, he was forced to replay it yesterday.

Except in this version, staged by Andrew Flintoff’s agent, one of England’s heaviest Test defeats was transformed into a famous Ashes-clinching victory by the heroic all-rounder.

Flintoff, despite being on one leg, managed to bowl out Australia and score a match-winning century before being hoisted off the pitch by delirious fans.

At least that is what we were invited to believe might have happened if only Strauss, Andy Flower, the team director, and the medics had not so short-sightedly deprived Flintoff of the chance to play at Headingley Carnegie.

“He was prepared to do whatever it takes, was prepared to put whatever needed to be put into his knee,” Andrew “Chubby” Chandler, said. “They didn’t want him.” With those words, Chandler threw out a million what ifs, might have beens and if onlys for disgruntled England supporters to grasp.

It was a cracking scoop for Mike Atherton, our cricket correspondent, but England’s management needed Chandler’s intervention like they need prolonged rain at the Brit Oval given what is already on their plate.

They face enough problems with the hard realities of England’s form without being ambushed by hypotheticals.

The hard reality they faced last Thursday night was that Flintoff was 80 per cent fit, at most, and likely to struggle to complete his share of overs, never mind bowl them with meaning. This was a second big match in a matter of days and Flintoff had finished the last variously described as “resembling a tiring prizefighter”, “not far from the point of physical breakdown” and “performing a passable impression of Monty Python’s Black Knight” (the one with his arms and legs hacked off who proclaims “Tis nothing but a scratch”).

He had struggled to complete just 15 overs in each innings at Edgbaston, failing to claim a single wicket, and had subsequently kept his bowling in the nets down to the bare minimum. There was also the fifth Test to factor in, which would come after a break. In the circumstances, no one was surprised at his absence.

We are now led to believe that Flintoff was devastated and nonplussed because he knows his own body better than anyone, but the idea of a sportsman judging his own fitness sets off particularly shrill alarms among those of us who have followed the national football team.

Indulging half-fit players, sometimes several at a time, has been the squad’s downfall at more than one tournament in the past decade. It is never an easy call when you have a player as important as David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or Michael Owen — or, indeed, the mighty Flintoff — but we objected loudly, and justifiably, to those shows of weak management at World Cups and European Championships.

Flintoff is, by all accounts, courageous and imbued with the team ethic but could he truly be trusted to make such a decision coldly and rationally only days before he retires from Test cricket any more than Beckham should have been listened to at Euro 2004 when he simply ran out of puff, despite all his protests otherwise?

Our Fred has not always displayed a scientific knowledge about what his body can or cannot take on the evidence of some notorious refuelling incidents, or his ill-fated attempt to squeeze in a lucrative visit to the Indian Premier League between the tour to the West Indies and the Ashes. With Flintoff, England took a strong decision, and no doubt a very reluctant one, believing it was best for that game, best for the series overall.

Should they have known that they would be skittled out so cheaply? Could they have guessed that Flintoff would have made a difference? Hypothetical questions, as someone once said, deserve hypothetical answers.

It is the job of Chandler to serve his client rather than the needs of the England team and that, quite blatantly, is what he has done. He has enhanced the idea of Flintoff as the great saviour of the nation, and ensured maximum pressure on the selectors to give him the benefit of the doubt at the Oval.

But one was rather hoping, as England stare down the barrel of an Ashes defeat by beatable opponents, that the needs of Flintoff and his team might share common ground.

That is still possible in the fifth Test when Flintoff has the chance to produce his heroics; to play the match-winning innings and to come roaring in from the Pavilion End in one final, thrilling performance to cap a superb career.

Flintoff has the chance to do it for real, and after a proper rest. Blame England’s leadership for many things, but not for investing in that scenario before Chandler’s flight of fancy.

One of game’s last acts of goodwill booted out because of cheats

In 2000, Paolo Di Canio picked up the ball with his hands rather than take advantage of an injury to Paul Gerrard, the Everton goalkeeper. Given that he could have scored, Di Canio was lauded for his sportsmanship.

But the convention of stopping play to help a (seemingly) injured opponent has become so corrupted by cheats that yesterday even the FA, defender of the game’s morals, all but declared it scrapped.

Play to the whistle, was the FA’s edict and one we back wholeheartedly. Our advice to players is that if it is blood they see on an opponent, assume it was the fake stuff they attained from Harlequins rugby union club.

Our advice to referees is to give the advantage to the team with the ball whenever possible and assume that a player is pretending unless you actually hear the bone crack.

Football has precious few honourable conventions that it seems odd to urge the binning of one of those left. But this is where we have been heading since 2006 when, despairing of the feigning at the World Cup, the Premier League formally announced an end to the convention of kicking the ball out.

The trouble was that neither Uefa nor Fifa followed suit and the Football League, believing its players to be less cynical, did not buy into it. Nor did many of you. Fans would still howl when one of their own players was prone, putting referees under pressure to intervene and on players to kick the ball out.

But the FA called it an “historical” convention yesterday, with all that the word implies.

By our hard-headed modern interpretation, Chelsea were right to play on when Patrice Evra was felled during the Community Shield on Sunday.

And Chris Foy, the referee, was not obliged to stop the game even if he had seen the incident, given, a) Evra was not seriously injured, b) Wayne Rooney had the ball at his feet 40 yards from goal, a decent enough advantage.

Kicking the ball out was a lovely convention while it lasted but die it will, until that Di Canio incident seems as quaint as the maximum wage. Perhaps it feels that way now.