It’s not just cricketers who use their reputation as a weapon. You get comedians who have been around for years and earned the right for people to laugh at them. Their material might not even be funny any more, but people want to laugh at them regardless. Some young comedian might follow them on the stage, have loads of great jokes and not get anywhere near as many laughs, because no one knows who they are. It’s the same with old singers, whose voices have cracked and can’t reach the notes like they used to. Taken in isolation, their voices are shot to bits. But people still want to hear them, because of how good their voices were in the past.
So when I say that Ben Stokes’ ability is bolstered by his reputation, that’s not trying to do him down, that’s the ultimate compliment. Not many people in this world have that kind of presence. Even when Ben’s standing in the field, he has an aura about him. He lets batsmen know he’s there, just by the way he carries himself. That’s an incredible weapon for a sportsperson to have in their armoury. He still wouldn’t get me out though, and if we’re going to make this a Top Trumps contest, I reckon I’ve got him covered when it comes to fielding. He does a lot of diving in the slips, whereas I just stuck my hands out. When it comes to fielding, sometimes less is more. Ben might be more agile and look quicker than me, but I was a chess player, quick in the mind and a few moves ahead. You don’t have to be diving anywhere, just read it! And it didn’t matter if you stuck me on the boundary, I didn’t drop a catch in the outfield between 1998 at Nottingham and the Big Bash in 2013, when I shelled a skyer. Fifteen years without dropping a ball, I was absolutely gutted.
I had a pretty weird career, in that I was injured for my first 20-odd Test matches. I couldn’t bowl properly because of a knackered back and wasn’t a good enough batter to make up for it. I had a few years when I was quite useful, including the 2005 Ashes series, before getting injured again. Then I had a couple of good series towards the end of my career, when my bowling was as fast as it had ever been, my batting was coming together a little bit and I honestly thought I was coming into my own as a cricketer. But then injury forced me to retire at 31. So it looks like I never really fulfilled my talent or promise. But my legacy, as people like to call it, is more complicated, in that some people look at my numbers and conclude that I underachieved, while other people get all romantic and conclude that I was better than I was. I’d like to get rid of those 20-odd Tests at the start of my career, because I was rubbish. After that, I was a decent cricketer who had some good days and was usually more influential against better opposition. But I feel uncomfortable when people suggest that I was a great cricketer. I wasn’t, my numbers and averages tell you that. But that doesn’t bother me, because I was never just batting or bowling, I was always battling something else, whether it was injuries, depression, an eating disorder or all sorts of other things. So when I look back on my career, I’m actually really proud of it. I think I did all right.
But joking aside, Ben Stokes is a better cricketer than I was, although he’s got plenty of work to do to be considered England’s greatest ever cricketer. Jimmy Anderson’s taken more wickets than any other fast bowler in Test cricket, and while England has produced plenty of excellent players – people like Ben, Ian Botham, Alastair Cook and Graham Gooch – I’d argue that in the modern era, Jimmy is the only Englishman who is a genuine all-time great of world cricket. For what he’s done on wickets all over the world, he’s right up there with the likes of Glenn McGrath, Curtly Ambrose and Wasim Akram. And he’s from Burnley! Ben might get to that level, but he’s got Jacques Kallis to aim for, and he scored over 13,000 runs and took 292 wickets in Tests. When Ben retires, I hope he’ll be spoken about in the same breath. But to do that, he has to do more than smash it about and score the odd eye-catching 100. He has to be consistent. That’s tough for an all-rounder, because it’s hardly ever the case that both parts of your game are where you want them to be. If Ben can find that consistency, who knows.
Ben certainly had a fine 2019, what with that incredible match-winning innings in the World Cup final and an excellent Ashes series. I actually did the opening ceremony for the World Cup, which was an absolute shambles and will probably go down as one of the worst moments in television history. We were meant to be broadcasting during breaks in the ceremony, but no one told us, so there was loads of dead air. Paddy McGuinness was trying to speak but didn’t have a cameraman and I ended up trying to interview someone I wasn’t meant to interview just to fill time (it was actually Pakistani Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, although I didn’t know that at the time). The good part was, they gave me five tickets for the final, which meant I finally got to experience what it was like being a cricket fan. I’d often wondered what it must be like sitting in one of those seats, and it turns out it’s a bloody long day. The last two hours were amazing, but I had to watch everything else to get to that point. And I did find myself thinking, ‘I’d love to be playing in this game.’ It’s not like I wished I was Ben Stokes, but I did wish I had the opportunity to influence the game in the way he was influencing it. I don’t think that will ever go.
As soon as the England lads had lifted the trophy, I had to jump in the car and drive to Scarborough because my boys were playing there for Lancashire. But it was amazing to see England win it in person, because part of me thought it wouldn’t happen. I backed them to win it before the tournament, because I’m patriotic and thought they were the best team. But we almost always mess up on the biggest occasions, that’s just the English way. So when we got to the final, I thought we were going to get turned over. And I still thought we were going to get turned over until about the last 20 minutes. After that, everything went in our favour. First, Trent Boult caught Ben Stokes but stepped on the rope, and then Ben was awarded another six after a throw ricocheted off his bat and over the boundary. How we won that game I don’t know, because there is absolutely no way that should have been given as six. The biggest game in cricket, watched by millions of people all over the world, and they got the rules wrong. How can that happen? There weren’t just two umpires, there was a third and a fourth umpire watching it upstairs. And none of them knew that it should have been five runs instead of six. I didn’t know the rule either, but I was a fan sat in the crowd! The Kiwis took it well, as they had to, but I bet they were seething inside. Had any of those four umpires known the rules, they would have won their first World Cup, not England.
After winning the World Cup, England’s players should have been everywhere and lionised as heroes. The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and players’ agents should have been working overtime, trying to get those players all over the radio, on chat shows, panel shows, Question Time, Newsnight and Saturday Superstore, in the papers, on websites, pretty much anywhere that would have them, for their own benefit and the benefit of English cricket. But English cricket is terrible at marketing itself and its players. When I was playing, one of the ECB’s big things was wanting players to be recognised by at least 10 per cent of the population. That doesn’t sound like many people, but it’s actually a very ambitious number. We had a meeting about it, and when I asked how they were going to achieve it, they replied, ‘We just want you to be recognised.’
‘But how are we going to make that happen? What are we going to do?’
‘We hadn’t really thought about that. We’d just like you to be.’
They didn’t have a plan of action, it was just some woolly notion. It seemed that nothing changed much after I retired, which meant that the World Cup victory, which was shown on terrestrial TV and watched by millions in the UK, wasn’t capitalised on. I know from working in TV that producers, commissioners and the like aren’t interested in having cricketers on shows because they don’t sell. They don’t usually play on terrestrial TV, the public don’t know who they are, so TV people aren’t interested in them either. So England winning the World Cup was the perfect time to get players out there, promoting themselves and the game. But it didn’t happen, the euphoria quick
ly died down, and how many of those England players would be recognised if they walked into a pub today? Probably Ben, but that’s about it.
Then again, I remember doing a Morrisons advert just after retiring and getting recognised more than I ever did playing cricket. I think they must have been showing it a lot during X Factor breaks. That made me realise how small the world of cricket is. Now, there are people who watch me on various things who don’t even know I played cricket, like I used to watch Andrew Castle present GMTV and have no idea he played tennis.
CHAPTER FIVE
YOU’RE CANCELLED
Usually when people say something is ‘political correctness gone mad’, what they really mean is they’re upset that someone has been called out for saying something racist, homophobic or sexist. So political correctness is a good thing. It basically means having respect for other people, not saying things that might upset people, make them feel uncomfortable or excluded. But – and I’m about to contradict myself slightly – it has got slightly out of hand.
Now, people are constantly being hammered for accidentally saying the ‘wrong’ thing. It might not even be racist, homophobic or sexist, it might just be a word or an opinion that was perfectly acceptable last week but has suddenly become problematic. There are also people policing what people are and aren’t talking about, or whose social-media posts they’re liking or retweeting. Sometimes it’s difficult to know what you’re allowed to have an opinion on, how to say it and whether you should open your mouth at all.
It used to be easy to spot if people were being nasty or rude. And if you saw someone being nasty or rude, you’d d0 something about it. Or would you? Recently, I watched a drama series called The Loudest Voice about Roger Ailes, the former chairman of Fox News, who was a serial sexual abuser. I found myself wincing a lot and thinking, ‘I’ve never come across anyone like this. How is it allowed to happen? Why didn’t anyone stop him?’ It’s tempting to think that had you been there, you would have said something. But clearly it’s not as simple as that. The horrible truth is that had I been around 40 or 50 years ago, I probably would have been a complete dinosaur by modern standards. You see clips of old sitcoms now, like Love Thy Neighbour (which is about a white couple who live next door to a black couple) and can’t believe it ever got made, because it’s just so racist. They made eight series, so obviously it was a big hit in the ratings.
The difference now is that people who have genuinely made mistakes are being hammered. Their crime might be making a point too clumsily or using the wrong terminology. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re prejudiced or discriminatory, it might just mean they didn’t get the memo. Take people identifying as someone or something else. If someone wants to be a dog or whatever they want to be, I’m not bothered. That’s their business. But if I forget that they think they’re a dog, don’t get your knickers in a twist about it. I just forgot! And no doubt if I use the phrase ‘don’t get your knickers in a twist’, someone will pop up and tell me that that’s a horribly sexist phrase, which perpetuates the stereotype that women are more likely to get hysterical. That just shows you how ridiculous it is, because I thought men were allowed to wear knickers anyway? People are so intolerant, unforgiving and spiteful. That’s why we’ve got this cancel culture, because people love getting offended and jumping on people’s mistakes or opinions that vary from theirs. It’s a national sport.
That’s why I’m better off away from social media, because I can’t keep up with the terminology. I’m a bloke from Preston, end of story. The idea of identifying as something or someone else means nothing to me. It makes no sense. If someone else wants to identify as something or someone else, that’s fine by me. I’ll be polite and go along with it. But it’s like Catchphrase, ‘say what you see’, in that I might get it wrong. I’d sincerely apologise for that, but I wouldn’t mean anything by it. I won’t do it on purpose or mean to hurt anyone, I’ll just have made a mistake. Not everyone has to understand each other, as long as people respect each other. There are people out there saying all sorts of stuff that’s quite obviously horrible and nasty, on purpose, so have a go at them instead!
The closest I’ve come to being ‘cancelled’ was when I was on social media a few years ago and having a bit of back and forth with Jimmy Anderson about Preston and Burnley, which is where he comes from. I said something about people from Burnley having a special six-finger handshake and the town crier having to read out his tweets, all of it in good humour, and people started having a go at me for being prejudiced against under-privileged people and people with disabilities. Of course I wasn’t, but I’ve learned that the excuse that you were just having a laugh and a joke with a mate doesn’t wash with some people. Then there was an interview I did with Piers Morgan for GQ magazine. I told him a story about being in a hotel, phoning reception and the woman not being able to understand my food order, because of my thick Preston accent and the fact she wasn’t originally from England. The media picked up on it and suddenly I was a racist, the second coming of Enoch Powell. The Daily Mail headline was, ‘Andrew Flintoff in bizarre anti-immigration outburst.’ I thought, ‘Do I really have to explain this?’, before ignoring it and letting it go away. You could drive yourself mad trying to analyse if what people are saying about you has any merit, but I knew I hadn’t said anything wrong. And they wonder why so many sportspeople don’t give interviews, or if they do, they sound so vanilla. Why would you bother if saying something innocuous can get you into hot water? It’s got to the stage where there are opinions I hold that I’d never make public, for fear of never working again.
When I used to play for England in South Africa, they had a quota system, which meant that they had to pick X number of black players. That could be a little bit frustrating from a competitive point of view, because it meant we weren’t playing against their best possible team. But when I think about it now, it made sense. Making sure black people got opportunities that had been denied to them for so long was more important than the outcome of a game of cricket. For the same reason, maybe a woman getting a presenting job is more important, in terms of changing the overall culture, than a bloke missing out on a job that he should have got according to his credentials.
In the meantime, there will be disgruntled people on both sides, like we’re seeing now with sports punditry. There are still people who have a problem with female pundits in men’s sport, whether it be football, cricket or rugby union. The argument goes that they can’t possibly know what they’re talking about because they haven’t played it. But someone like Alex Scott is amazing, she clearly knows what she’s talking about. And she’s miles better than some of the men. They’ve all played men’s football to a high level, but they’re not very good at articulating their knowledge. It’s the same in cricket. I listen to them sometimes and think, ‘What are you on?’ It’s like they never played the game. Playing at the highest level isn’t everything.
And I don’t understand the problem with female sports presenters at all. Laura Woods on talkSPORT is brilliant at what she does.
In some ways it’s a good thing that people are more open about what offends them, because it means that people take more care over what they say and maybe we live in a kinder society. I popped into the England dressing room not so long ago and it seemed very different to my day, a far nicer place. Twenty years ago, any chink in your armour and people would be all over you. Because I was overweight, I got slaughtered. I couldn’t say anything, I just had to own the jokes and take the piss out of myself, however much it hurt me inside. Doing that meant I had some semblance of control. It was a very different world 20 years ago, people said far harsher stuff than they do now.
I also got a terrible kicking in the press for being fat, and walking out for one game between England and Zimbabwe at Old Trafford was one of the worst feelings ever. I was overcome with this feeling of self-loathing and shame. Because it was cricket, I couldn’t even run away, I just had to stand there for hours getting ab
use from the crowd. And while I was eventually able to manage the abuse, I never really came to terms with it. It was a lonely place for a long time and opened up wounds that will probably never heal.
But while it’s good that racism, homophobia and things like fat-shaming are now frowned upon, and that certain environments are less ruthless and more welcoming, it would be a very bland world if piss-taking was outlawed completely. If my mates stopped taking the piss out of me for being slightly ginger, having a big mole in the middle of my head or having a belly I can never get rid of, I’d be slightly worried. Because in my circle of friends, having the piss taken out of you has nothing to do with nastiness, it’s a test of how strong the bonds of friendship are and means you’re accepted.
I don’t mind having a laugh about my mental health. I realise my behaviour is a bit irrational at times and my mates take the piss out of me for it. For me, that’s a way of getting through it. I’m not saying it works for everyone, but if I don’t mind people taking the piss out of my irrational behaviour, and it actually helps me deal with it, that should be the end of it.
I’m never going to be an advocate of the ‘pull yourself together and man up’ school of snapping someone out of depression. But I sometimes have to do a bit of that to myself. I’ll give myself a talking to and tell myself to buck up. The way I see it, if you’re not willing to put any effort in, it’s difficult for anyone else to help. But not everyone is like me. Some people talk about their depression a lot. But that could be a form of therapy in itself, and if it makes them feel better about themselves, I can’t really criticise them. But others like to point the finger and claim that certain people aren’t ‘doing depression’ the right way. That’s not fair, because who knows what’s going on in people’s heads and everyone has different ways of coping with things.
Right, Said Fred Page 6
