Who’d be a talisman? Andrew Flintoff showed us yesterday how hard it is to carry the qualities that make for talismania. A talisman — Flintoff — is a player who makes things happen, who makes everybody around him play better, who makes everybody believe in the impossible and then set out to achieve it. A talisman has a gift instantly recognisable but beyond analysis.

A talisman is almost the exact opposite of a scapegoat. A scapegoat is charged with carrying everybody’s sins out into the desert, a talisman must carry the far heavier burden of hope and bring it back to us. Being a talisman looked by far the tougher of the two jobs as Flintoff attempted to turn the first npower Test match against Australia in England’s favour.

He did that talisman thing again and again in 2005, when England won back the Ashes. He would repeatedly turn a session, an innings, a match. He would do so with a devastating level of commitment, with huge energy and, above all, by means of his surging belief that he really was capable of doing anything, or, for that matter, everything.

He sought to summon that mood yesterday and it was glorious to behold. Phillip Hughes arrived as New Australia’s secret weapon, generously allowed by Middlesex to hone his skills in English conditions. He started like a train, peppering the off side with fours. Don’t give him anything to cut, the bowlers must have been told, and so naturally they could not help but feed the shot with morbid fascination.

Flintoff came on as first change and made it his business to change all that. It was extraordinary the difference he made as soon as he came into the attack. The game’s intensity was instantly racked up. In the day’s most compelling passage of play, he came at Hughes with total ferocity and he instantly made it personal.

He turned it into a duel. He pulled rank and told Hughes that he was still wet behind the ears. He intimidated Hughes with his sense of authority. He also intimidated with such things as pace and bounce, with short balls intended to scramble the senses.

True, James Anderson and Stuart Broad had also been bowling with pace and purpose, but Hughes had no problem with them. It was the way Flintoff made such a set at him that made the difference.

Mind you, he also had a crack at Simon Katich. This was the one that got away, an impossibly sharp caught and bowled chance, the meaty hand grasping it with two or three fingers — for a second it was there — but it squeezed out almost reluctantly and fell to the ground. Sometimes Flintoff will turn himself into a Rodin statue, holding a vigorous pose to indicate extremes of emotion. There he stood, legs planted wide apart, head bowed, hands clasping head: Freddie Agonistes. It would have been a different day for all had that one stuck.

But he got his man. He got the upstart Hughes, befuddling him and inducing an inside edge, and a rather good catch from Matt Prior. Cue the next Rodin statue — legs once more straddled, chest inflated like a bellows, arms wide, hands high, no smile, gaze level: Freddie Rex. The entire team were ignited with hope and belief. Nothing to do but watch the next wicket fall.

The snag was that it didn’t. Flintoff gave us a blazing six overs then took a break. Ricky Ponting and Katich set about digging in. It was as if a light had gone out. It was as if Australia and England had given themselves over to a ritual, a routine in which the England bowlers toiled without reward while the Australia batsmen moved gradually from safe to ominous, and Flintoff watched.

But we must be tender of our talisman, that’s the problem. Flintoff looks like a bull and runs in like a bull, but his left ankle is made of spun glass. Four operations, and you wince at every delivery stride, when his left foot hits the ground like a hammer. Flintoff has changed: once the heart of the England team, he is now a very handy bonus when fit.

He missed the past four Test matches, in series away to and at home to West Indies, and every match felt like an exercise in disaster planning: a contrived experiment in Life Without Freddie. Against most sides, England can make a decent fist of coping, but against Australia, they need Freddie.

This is not because Australia are that much better than everybody else. That is no longer the case, after the mass retirement of the greats. It is because Australia are still Australia and England are, at base, ever so slightly frightened of them.

Australia, even in transition, have enough to intimidate England. And that is Flintoff’s most important role: as the antidote to fear.

It worked, too, in that first spell of six overs. But it didn’t work at all in his subsequent five. The speed was down a notch, the direction askew by a couple of degrees, the self-belief down. In his final spell at the close of the day, he was striving for something that simply wasn’t there.

It is considered axiomatic that England will not win the Ashes without Flintoff. Yesterday, England had Flintoff, and a briefly majestic one at that. But briefly isn’t enough. What England needed yesterday, what England need today, is the Flintoff of 2005.