It’s a Monday afternoon at the Royal Household Cricket Club at Windsor Castle,
and four of England’s finest - Paul Collingwood, Andrew Strauss, Paul Nixon
and Stuart Broad - have just left the changing room for the first innings.
The match, a charity exhibition between a selection of the Volkswagen
Cricket Ambassadors and invited guests, begins after Pimm’s and lunch, and
the players enter the field charmed by a string quartet.
It is all perfectly civilised; Her Majesty, one feels, would approve. But a
short distance away, in a quiet corner of the ground, a much less noble
encounter has started and the short stuff is being served.
“Freddie, I’m sorry, but I read an interview you gave recently and it was
awful. It was like somebody had placed a muzzle on you.”
Shane Warne: “That’s a good start.” “But it was,”
I protest. “He didn’t say a thing.”
Warne: “Well, maybe he was asked bad questions.”
“No, this guy is one of the best.” Warne: “How do you
know? Have you been interviewed by him?”
“No,” I say. “I haven’t.” Warne: “So are
you going to make this interview a good one?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ll try, but . . .”
Andrew Flintoff: “He’s under pressure now, isn’t he, Warney?”
They both guffaw. “Okay, let’s start with you, Shane. How closely did you
follow the World Cup? Did you follow what happened to Freddie?”
Warne: “Oh look, I’m not saying it, because Freddie is here . . . I
like to call Freddie a friend; I enjoy playing against Freddie; he plays the
game the way it should be played. There’s not much bullshit with Fred; he
runs in and tries to knock you over, and when he bats, he tries to slog you
out of the park. Fred has always had the ability to lift people with the way
that he plays. One of the best overs I have seen was at Edgbaston when he
knocked over [Justin] Langer and [Ricky] Ponting. It’s disappointing when
people come out and bag Freddie; that’s wrong - I don’t like that very much
at all.”
“How much time have you guys spent in each other’s company since the
Ashes?”
Flintoff: “Not much. We played against Hampshire [a County Championship
game at the Rose Bowl in May] and we were both at a Unicef dinner the other
week.”
“Have you missed him?” Flintoff: “I’ve not missed batting
against him. When I went down to Southampton I’d not been in the best form.
I was building up to that game, working so hard and spending hours in the
nets and I thought I was playing quite nicely. I walk out and face Stuart
Clark on a wicket that was nibbling about. I hung in there and got through
Dimmy [Dimitri Mascarenhas], who is horrible to face on a wicket like that,
and then he comes on.”
Warne guffaws. Flintoff: “I hit his second ball for four and then miss
one. He got me out for 61, but he was always going to.”
“Have you socialised much together?” Flintoff: “During the
winter a bit, in the dressing room.”
Warne: “Yeah, even through 2005 we’d have a beer, whether England won
or we won. I enjoy Freddie’s company and always have done; we’d sit next to
each other after a day’s play and have a chat about what was going on.”
“There was speculation at one stage, Shane, that you might have been
interested in taking over from Duncan Fletcher?”
Warne (smiling): “No one asked me about it. I’ve always loved English
cricket and I’d like to think I’ve helped English cricket in a certain sort
of way. I’ve played seven years of county cricket and we’ve had a few blokes
come through the system and perform okay for England, but I’m Australian.”
“Okay, so it was speculation, but would it have interested you?”
Warne: “Not at this stage. If I wanted to do that, I may as well have
kept playing [at Test level]. I’m still bowling pretty well, I’m batting
okay, so if I wanted to spend that much time in the game, I’d play. Maybe a
few years down the track when the kids are older and I’m out of the game and
away from a lot of the people I have played with and against, it might be my
turn to get in then. But I’m not a big believer in coaches. At international
level you know your own game anyway and coaches can sometimes overcomplicate
things.”
“Okay, breaking news, Freddie: Shane Warne has just been appointed coach
of England. What would he bring to the team?”
Flintoff: “Well, the one thing obviously is what he could bring to the
spin bowlers. We had a conversation with Monty [Panesar] after the Sydney
Test; we were having a beer together and Monty came over and he was
desperate to talk to him and they sat there for an hour or so. And they
talked about spin bowling. He has 700 wickets! He knows what he’s doing,
doesn’t he? And obviously mentally he is very strong. He has that will to
win and that desire [he looks at Warne]. What’s that mission statement for
your foundation again? It’s ‘Never give up’, isn’t it?”
Warne: “Yeah, that’s what it’s about. Never give up, whatever the
situation is, because you can always find a way.”
“So that’s one thing he could definitely bring to the team, desire?”
Flintoff: “Desire, yeah, definitely.” “But wasn’t that
the difference between the teams during the winter? Brett Lee told a great
story about the boot camp before the Ashes and the way it . . .”
Warne: “No, it was a waste of time.” “But as a neutral,
I would have said that it was the perfect example of the difference between
the two sides: ‘Look how much the Aussies want this!’ ”
Warne: “The one thing it did do was . . . sometimes you can speak to three
different people and they will deliver the same message in three different
ways. The boot camp was a different way to reinforce the same things. My way
would have been to lock us all up in a pub. Take the point Fred made about
Monty. We sat in the dressing room and had a beer for an hour - that’s my
way of doing things, and it can have exactly the same impact as a boot camp,
if not better. I’m not a big fan of John Buchanan. I didn’t think he was a
very good coach. What was his role? How could he teach someone to play a
cover drive? How could he teach me to bowl? Some people thought he was
fantastic and didn’t get enough credit - I found that hard to believe.”
Flintoff: “You say they wanted it more because they went to the boot
camp, but that’s easy to say after the event. The bottom line is that we got
outplayed. Don’t talk to me about desire.”
“You don’t accept that?” Flintoff: “No, I’m not
having that.” “There was no complacency?” Flintoff:
“We got outplayed by a superior team riding high on the back of some great
results. It was like us in 2005; we beat everyone in world cricket before
playing these guys. We were on the crest of a wave but [in the last series]
we had players injured, players who hadn’t played because they were injured
- but I’m not making excuses, because we were outplayed.”
“How tough was being captain, given the hammering you took? I don’t
imagine you relished facing the media each day.”
Flintoff: “It was a different experience. As a player, you only do the
media if you’ve done something stupid [smiles] or at the end of a day’s play
when you’ve scored runs or taken wickets. You sit there at a press
conference and it’s nice; everyone is asking lovely questions - ‘What about
that shot?’ Or something about the way you bowled, and it’s lovely.” “There
wasn’t much of that last winter?” Flintoff: “No. To go into
a press conference after losing a Test match and then to go into another
press conference after losing another Test match was . . . the mood
throughout the winter got more aggressive in the press conferences, and that
was hard. It was completely different. The one thing I really didn’t like
was the manner in which some of the questions were asked. I mean, I’m
actually a human being sat up the front. I’m still a bloke! But there was no
respect, it was just . . .”
“They were snapping at you?” Flintoff: “Yeah.” Warne: “The
thing is, it looked a very one-sided contest, but when you break it down and
have a look at the first couple of Tests, it wasn’t that one-sided. I mean,
England made 400 or 380 in the last innings in Brisbane, and if they had . .
.”
Flintoff: “It was the second Test again, wasn’t it? In 2005 [at Edgbaston] we
managed to just get over by two runs, but if we had lost that, we could have
been staring down the barrel of a five-niller. The flip side of that was the
Adelaide Test. We had a chance of winning and then . . .”
Warne: “Adelaide was the turning point; you guys made 500 . . .”
Flintoff: “Yeah, Colly [Paul Collingwood] got a double [hundred]
and KP [Kevin Pietersen] got a big hundred.”
Warne: “To get 500 in the first innings and lose the match was a bloody
. . .”
Flintoff: “We lost it in an hour and a half.”
Warne: “Straussy [Andrew Strauss] got a bad decision against me and
then Belly [Ian Bell] got run out and then I got KP. And from there we just
got on a roll. We played some fantastic cricket, but I don’t think 5-0 was a
true indication of the difference between the sides. The first three Tests
were a lot closer than that.”
“Freddie, this time last year you were riding the crest of the wave and
could do no wrong, but then you have a tough time at the Ashes and an even
tougher World Cup. I mentioned that interview you gave at the start . . .
you seem shaken by the experience.”
Flintoff: “It’s been strange, I must admit - the attention it got and
the way it escalated and whatnot. I was THE-BLOKE-WHO-WENT-ON-THE-PEDALO,
not A-CRICKETER-WHO-DID-ALL-RIGHT and I just want to get back on the field
and put all that to bed. For two or three years I’ve had it pretty much my
own way; last winter wasn’t, and now I want to get back to playing the way I
know I can.”
“Have you any advice for him, Shane?” Warne: “Oh, Fred has
been around long enough to know what goes on. I suppose before 2005 English
cricket was also battling football and there wasn’t the same attention paid
to the cricketers, but that has changed. Instead of having someone every now
and again following you, they are all trying to outdo each other with the
scoop of what Andrew Flintoff is doing. I experienced that in 1993 with my
first ball to Mike Gatting - that changed my life.
“That Test match was amazing. I go out for dinner and there are half-a-dozen
snappers following me. And then you pick up the paper and it says: ‘TEN
THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT SHANE WARNE’. So I have experienced it for a
lot longer than Fred has. I know I’ve brought a lot of things on myself, but
at the end of the day it’s like facing short-pitched bowling - some people
play it okay, but no one likes it. The trick is learning how to adapt to it
and deal with it. Some people do it better than others. The more you dislike
the press and resent them for doing it, the more it eats away at you.”
“Freddie, I get the impression that you resent it?”
Flintoff: “At first it was a shock. That week when we won the Ashes, we
moved house on the Friday and there were five cars and TV cameras watching
me bringing boxes out of the garage and people staking us out outside the
house and I hated it. I was in my car and risking my neck trying to lose
them down country lanes. It was probably the missus who brought me around
[to accepting it] a little bit. I tend to turn a blind eye now and imagine
it’s not there, but it’s a shock when it first happens, a real shock.”
“And what about since the World Cup? Has that hurt?”
Flintoff: “Well, I was hurt by the fact that it was my third World Cup
and that was the furthest I had gone and it wasn’t very good, to be honest,
so from a playing point of view it hurt. Obviously things happened off the
field which weren’t ideal, but I’ve got to get on with it. It’s happened;
you can sit in your room and feel sorry for yourself, or you can get on with
your life.”
“Okay, we’re here at the invitation of your sponsors, Volkswagen Touareg,
and Shane, you’ve been getting them lots of publicity. Tell me about your
trip to the Harry Potter premiere.”
Warne: “It was quite funny. I know the manager of the Royal Garden
Hotel [in Kensington, west London], so I drove up from Southampton and we
parked outside. We were running a bit late. So we rushed out of the car but
one of the kids had taken his Game Boy and I said, ‘Mate, you don’t need
that, put it back in the car’, but he didn’t shut the door properly. So off
we went to the premiere and I met Daniel Radcliffe and he said, ‘Shane
Warne! You’ve got 708 Test wickets! You’re a legend’. And I went, ‘Nice to
meet you, mate, these are my kids’. So then he pulls out a Wisden and says,
‘You wouldn’t sign this?’ I thought, ‘This is hilarious’. So I pulled out my
ticket and said, ‘Okay, mate, but you will have to sign this.’ I love the
Harry Potter films. We watched a great show and went back to the hotel and
there’s a notice on the windscreen of the car: ‘There were some people
wandering around your car and all of your valuables are now inside with the
concierge’. So I went in and saw the boss and he said, ‘We thought someone
had parked the car and left it unattended with a bomb in there. We’ve had
the bomb squad here. It was lucky we knew it was you’.”
“Are you a Harry Potter fan, Fred?” Flintoff: “No.” Warne:
“Sorry, Fred, you’re wrong, mate. I didn’t get into that Lord Of The Rings,
but Harry Potter is outstanding.”
“And what about the future, Shane? Have you thought about what you’d like
to be doing in 10 years’ time?”
Warne: “No, I’m not a person who thinks five or 10 years down the
track. My only concern, as a father, is to try to be the best parent I
possibly can. Cricket lasts a certain amount of time, but your kids are
yours for the rest of your life and you’ve got to enjoy every single moment.
You can bowl Andrew Strauss at the MCG and that’s fine, but when your boy
whispers, ‘I love you Dad’ in your ear and squeezes you really tight, that’s
what it’s about.”
“What about you, Fred?” Flintoff: “Yeah, the same thing,
obviously - parenting. Cricket-wise? Well, that’s what I do, and everything
I have off the pitch comes from performing on it and at the minute I can’t
do it because I am injured. I want to get back out there and establish
myself as an exceptional cricketer.”
“Do you ever worry that you won’t?” Flintoff: “It
has crossed my mind, but I don’t worry about it because I can’t control it.
I’m trying to do everything I can to play again - that’s all I can control
at this moment and hopefully that’s going to be fine. If it isn’t, I’ll
think about it, but I tend to live for the moment.”
“That’s something you both share?” Warne: “Yeah,
down the track . . . who knows? I have business interests; I’ve got my
family; I’ve got my foundation, which is raising money for underprivileged
children. I’m lucky in that being pretty successful on the cricket field has
opened up so many doors. I’ve had offers for different things, movies, TV.”
“Movies?” Warne: “Yeah.” “What sort of
roles?” Warne (laughs): “I’m not going to say.” Flintoff: “It was
Rocky VII.” Warne: “Naah, a couple of Indian ones.” “What
about you, Fred? Any movies yet?” Flintoff: “No, I’m a cricketer.
And at this moment in time I’ve enough on my plate.”
Best of enemies, best of friends: Flintoff and Warne
Andrew Flintoff
Age 29
Test debut v South Africa at Trent Bridge, 1998 n In 67 Tests, he has
scored 3,381 run at 32.5, scoring five centuries and 24 fifties. He has also
taken 197 wickets
In the second Test against Australia at Edgbaston in August 2005, he was named
man of the match after breaking Ian Botham’s 1981 record of six sixes in an
Ashes Test with five in the first innings and four in the second. In the
same game, he took seven wickets. He took 24 wickets during the series and
averaged 40.2 with the bat
Awards NBC Denis Compton Award 1997; Walter Lawrence Trophy 1999;
Wisden Cricketer of the Year 2004; ICC One-Day Player of the Year 2004; ICC
Player of the Year 2005; BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2005; awarded
the MBE in 2005
Shane Warne
Age 37
Debut v India at Sydney, 1992
Played 145 Tests for Australia, taking 708 wickets
In 36 Tests against England, he took 195 wickets, including the memorable
‘ball of the century’ against Mike Gatting at Old Trafford in 1993 in his fi
rst Ashes game
Although he played on the losing side in the 2005 Ashes series, Warne took 40
wickets at an average of 19.9 and scored 249 runs. He has scored the most
Test runs (3,154) without a century. He is also third overall in the most
Test ducks
Awards Wisden Cricketer of the Year 1994; One-Day International Player
of the Year 2000; one of five Wisden Cricketers of the Century 2000; Test
Player of the Year 2006
