I actually think fans are more likely to turn their back on the Premier League because of the lack of competitiveness, rather than perceived immorality. Because the top five or six clubs have so much more money than everyone else, and the gap seems to be getting wider, it’s all become very predictable. And if a competition is predictable, people are likely to stop watching, in the same way they’ll stop watching a TV series that’s been running for years and become repetitive. Americans understand that, which is why they have a draft system to at least try to give everyone a chance.
Yes, Liverpool won the title in 2020 for the first time in 30 years. But it was hardly a surprise, given how much money they spent on transfers and wages. And something’s not right when only two or three teams are capable of winning the league at the start of the season (I know Leicester won it in 2015–16, but something like that will probably never happen again). If 17 or 18 teams in a 20-team league know they can’t win it, it’s difficult not to conclude that it’s all a bit pointless. There was a time when the also-rans would maybe nick a cup here and there to keep the fans happy, but even that doesn’t happen much anymore. Clubs like West Ham or Newcastle have absolutely zero chance of winning the Premier League and almost no chance of winning a cup. So if you’re a fan, what have you got to look forward to each season? An outside chance of a seventh-place finish? Not getting relegated? It must be depressing. But people still go, week after week, year after year, knowing they’ve got no chance of doing anything. It’s a strange phenomenon.
More and more, the Premier League resembles Formula 1. They’re both incredibly slick products but they’re not very exciting. Although I have an appreciation for Lewis Hamilton. And the really mad thing is that the Premier League is actually quite unpredictable compared to other European leagues. In Scotland, Celtic have won nine league titles in a row. No club apart from them and Rangers has won the league since 1985. In Italy, Juventus have also won nine in a row. In Germany, Bayern Munich have won eight in a row. In France, Paris Saint-Germain have won seven of the last eight. In Spain, only two teams apart from Real Madrid and Barcelona have won the league in the twenty-first century. In Holland, only two teams apart from Ajax and PSV Eindhoven have won the league in the twenty-first century. It’s all a bit daft.
I actually think it’s a lot more enjoyable supporting a team in the lower leagues, because you never know what you’re going to get from season to season. Your team might end up in relegation scrap, a promotion fight or be yo-yoing between the top and the bottom of the league all season. They might surprise you and go on a cup run. Supporting a sports team should be about experiencing the full range of emotions. Not sitting in the middle of the Premier League season after season, because you don’t have quite as much money as the teams in the top six or seven. Or qualifying for Europe season after season, simply because your team is richer than most of the other teams.
Your team getting relegated might sting a bit, but at least it’s character building. And when your team is battling to stay up all season and manages to avoid the drop on the final day, the elation is like winning the World Cup. On top of that, players are often fighting for their futures in the lower leagues, which adds another layer of jeopardy. If their team gets relegated, will they be offloaded? Will they end up at an even smaller club in an even lower league? Will they suddenly be on 50 per cent less money? Will they end up on the scrapheap? They’re not as talented as the boys in the Premier League, but success and failure means every bit as much to them. Sure, watching Liverpool fizz the ball about and run rings around opponents is wonderful. But watching 22 players scrap for their lives in a League Two six-pointer has its own special appeal.
When I was a kid, I watched Preston quite a bit, when they were playing in the old Division Three. And recently, I started watching them again and have really enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong, I like watching Manchester City in the Premier League. They look after you so well, especially if you’re in their Tunnel Club. That means getting to watch the players walk through a glass tunnel on their way to the pitch (which is a bit weird), eating beautiful food and watching the game from a big heated seat. But that’s when the problem starts for me. Because the fans just expect their team to massacre the opposition, the atmosphere can be quite sterile when they’re not.
Meanwhile, at Preston, you get a real sense of what it all means to the fans. They don’t expect their team to win every week or to play well, but it’s not about that. They desperately want them to succeed, but it’s more about supporting them because it’s their local team and the right thing to do. It’s about the belonging and the community and the realisation that the team’s success or failure will have a knock-on effect for the city as a whole, and I love it.
The tribal nature of football isn’t always a good thing, but it can be. I feel the pride when I watch Preston. I desperately want them to do well and I can feel that everyone else does as well. I look around and see the same people sat in the same seats they’ve been sat in for years, through thick and mainly thin. You certainly won’t find many Preston fans at Deepdale who aren’t from the city. And while the quality isn’t as good as it is at City, it’s drama in the true sense, because you never know what’s going to happen. Not long ago, I went to watch Preston at Deepdale and in the first half they played like Brazil. In the second half, they played like 11 blokes who had never seen a football before. God knows what the manager said to them at half-time, but it was one of the most bizarre transformations I’ve ever seen.
But even that’s got to be more meaningful that watching City beating someone 5–0 and wondering why my heated seat isn’t working. At the Etihad, I’ve seen people complain about their heated seat not being hot enough. When City were playing at Maine Road, before their move to the Etihad, a fan would buy a cup of Bovril if they were feeling a bit chilly. And I’ll look around and see that some people aren’t even watching. They’ll be taking pictures of their food or themselves and presumably sticking them up on Instagram. In contrast, at another Preston game I went to there was a woman handing out ginger biscuits she’d baked. She took the lid off this Tupperware box and people were passing this box around. That’s the nice side of tribalism in football. Mind you, she ran down the front and gobbed at the referee at half-time. Not really . . .
I don’t know if sport ceases to be sport if it becomes predictable, but it certainly becomes more boring. The dictionary definition of sport includes the word ‘compete’, so the less competitive something is, the less it can claim to be sport. That’s why international sport is often more compelling than club sport, because money is usually less of a deciding factor. One of the charms of watching England play sport, whether it’s football, cricket or rugby union, is the unpredictability. In the last few years, we’ve seen the England football team get knocked out of the European Championships by Iceland and reach the semi-finals of the World Cup. One year, the England cricket team is beating Australia in the Ashes, the next they’re losing to Holland in a World Cup. That makes being an England sports fan fun. And it mirrors my cricket career: on any given day I could score a load of runs, take a load of wickets or completely embarrass myself. And while English fans might grumble about their teams’ failures, they secretly love it. We’re not like Americans, who aren’t interested in anything they’re not good at. We like ups and downs, it reflects our national character and standing in the world. And we like having a moan.
With Laura in charge on talkSPORT, we were never short of things to discuss. And instead of constantly arguing about the latest VAR controversy, which is what most football chat seems to consist of nowadays, we were able to get to know guests properly. And when I wanted to mix things up a bit, I’d chuck in some conspiracy theory chat. When that happened, suddenly everyone had an opinion and there were even newspaper headlines about me thinking the earth was shaped like a turnip and that Elvis was still alive. I’d seen a picture in one of the newspapers of a gardener at Graceland, who was the spit of Elvis, o
r as he might look now. But what people don’t realise is that I’m saying this stuff for my own amusement. I don’t really think Elvis is alive, I just said that I hoped he was alive. Just as I didn’t really think the Loch Ness Monster might have come out of hiding during lockdown because of the lack of human activity. It was a joke!
Presenting a radio show like that is a real skill, because you can’t really sit on the fence. If there’s an argument going on about something that doesn’t really interest me, I’ll usually just stay out of it. I’m not the sort of person who says things for the sake of it, which makes me quite unusual nowadays, because everyone seems to think that you should have an opinion on everything, whether you know anything about it or not. If I didn’t feel strongly about something, I’d try to relate it to something similar I’d been through during my career as a cricketer. That said, that’s quite difficult to do when you’re discussing footballers on three hundred grand a week potentially taking a pay cut, because it’s not something I have any experience of. And if a subject came up that did interest me, I sometimes had to rein myself in a bit, because in the real world, away from the microphone, I don’t always express myself in the most articulate way. And you can’t really be effing and blinding on the radio at seven o’clock in the morning while people are eating their cereal.
I’ve always had a huge amount of respect for live broadcasters, people like Richard Bacon, who’s presented shows on lots of different stations, and 5 Live’s Nihal Arthanayake. And Alan Brazil is brilliant. The whole time he’s been doing that show (he now does Thursdays and Fridays), he’s never once sounded like he didn’t want to be there. Like the best radio presenters, he seems interested in every word a guest says, can flit from subject to subject and comes across as knowledgeable about pretty much everything, which he can’t possibly be. That’s a real skill, natural or not. Ally McCoist is similar, in that he has that ability to natter away about anything, as if you’re sitting in a pub with a pint. But he’s been broadcasting for years now, what with A Question of Sport and his own chat show up in Scotland.
What I find with former sportspeople of an older vintage is that they just have so many great stories and tell them incredibly well. They don’t talk a lot because they like the sound of their own voice, they just really enjoy entertaining people and making them laugh. That’s why their stories get better every time they tell them. I’d even go as far as to say that older sportspeople are simply more interesting, probably because sport was more interesting when they were playing. Sport is so professional nowadays that youngsters don’t really do much other than train and play, whereas the likes of Ally and Alan Brazil had a lot of fun away from the football pitch. Alan could write an entire book about horse racing, his love of wine and whatever else, while Ally even did a movie with Robert Duvall and Michael Keaton, called A Shot at Glory. It wasn’t as if Ally just had a walk-on part, he was a headliner. I went on A Question of Sport when I was 20 and was in awe of him.
It’s always weird when you see famous people pop up in places they’re not ‘supposed’ to be. I was watching the Rocky film Creed in a cinema in Australia when the British boxer Tony Bellew suddenly appeared on the screen. I literally did a double take and wanted to shout, ‘That’s Tony Bellew! That’s Tony Bellew!’ Not that anyone in Australia would have known who Tony Bellew was, but I was just so excited.
As I’m sure Tony would tell you, when you become famous for one thing and start doing something completely different, the public sometimes find it difficult to deal with. They just struggle to compute it. Tony had this reputation as a mouthy, lairy boxer, but he’s been on A League of Their Own a few times and is brilliant, probably the best guest we’ve ever had. He’s game for a laugh, hams things up and is actually a bit of a softie under the hard exterior. But because he was a boxer, and people have certain preconceptions about boxers, I think he’s struggling to carve out an identity for himself beyond the ring. And if he does manage to, people will start to think he’s two different people, just as they do with me.
There are honestly people out there who think Andrew Flintoff and Freddie Flintoff aren’t the same person. But it doesn’t bother me that people didn’t know I played cricket. Let’s face it, more people aren’t into cricket than are. In fact, I’d say it’s a good thing, because it suggests I’ve made a success of my second career. The same goes for someone like Alan Brazil, who was actually a very good footballer and played for Scotland in a World Cup, but lots of people know him only as a broadcaster. People not knowing he was an elite footballer is probably the best compliment he can receive. And Andrew Castle, the former tennis player, is a prime example of someone whose broadcasting career has been far more successful than his sporting one. But people aren’t always accepting of ex-sports-people trying to switch to another career. They’ll see me pop up where I’m not ‘supposed’ to and think, ‘Why is he on my TV?’
My mate Tom Davis was a scaffolder before he became a comedy writer and actor, and the comedian Romesh Ranganathan was a maths teacher. The fact they had ‘normal’ lives before becoming famous is seen as a good thing. But when an ex-sportsperson tries to have a crack at something else, people say, ‘What the hell does he know? He should stick to cricket.’ I had it with Top Gear: ‘What does Flintoff know about cars?’ But how does the fact that I once played cricket for a living have any influence on how well I can present a programme about cars? It makes no sense. People need to chill out a bit, instead of wanting people to stay in their box. In the ‘real’ world, people change careers all the time. And if ex-cricketer Imran Khan can be prime minister of Pakistan, then I can chat about a new car for a few minutes.
CHAPTER TEN
GETTING OLDER, GETTING BOLDER
There are certain tell-tale signs that you’re getting old. When you find yourself seeking sanctuary in your own house, that’s a big one. I know people who can sit in the toilet for half an hour at a time, scrolling through their phone. Like people would have done with a newspaper, before the internet ruined everything. That’s never been me, I’m very much an in-and-out kind of guy, toilet-wise. But I understand the thinking. And maybe that will be me, eventually. If you’ve got four kids, you can lock yourself away under the stairs and get a bit of peace and quiet. Paradise, if you don’t mind the smell of your own shit.
I have found myself sitting in the garage quite a bit. That’s my haven. I’ve got my exercise bike in there, one of those Pelotons. Or sometimes I sit in a camp chair, stick some music on and just stare at the wall. Or I leave the door open and stare at my cars outside on the drive. I find it incredibly peaceful. Until I suddenly start thinking, ‘What the hell have you become?’ And then I’ll have a bit of a panic and reply to myself, ‘A tit. That’s what you’ve become. An absolute tit.’ But then I calm down again and think, ‘Nothing wrong with getting old. It happens to everyone. Might as well embrace it.’
When you’re younger, people think you’re a bit odd if you want to sit on your own. If anyone under the age of 30 told their mates that they had a shed with its own power and they pottered around in there for fun, they’d get slaughtered. Everyone would be calling them an old man. But as you get older, you come to realise that spending time on your own is a necessity. Even if it’s for only 20 minutes now and then. It’s good to be an old man.
No one wants to be constantly surrounded by people. It’s not natural. I’m sure cavemen chilled out on their own, sitting in a tree or on the edge of a lake, with their feet dangling in the water. The main attraction is the lack of noise. And it’s amazing what you can achieve when you’re on your own in a shed or a garage. You don’t have to sit there with your headphones on. You can build a ship from matchsticks or sit under a blanket and write books, like Roald Dahl. Or, if you’ve got a greenhouse, you can grow vegetables. It doesn’t even matter if the vegetables are rubbish and you don’t bother eating them, it’s the peace and contentment you get from nurturing them that counts.
The problem – and it�
�s a very modern problem – is that sheds and garages aren’t what they were. Not too long ago, a man sitting in a camp chair in his shed or garage would be surrounded by bags of compost and tins of paint. Now, they tend to be a bit more pimped up. People put gyms, giant speakers and DJ decks in there. So in reality, they’re just swapping one kind of noise for a different kind of noise. That’s why I like to keep my garage mainly low-tech. Apart from the Peloton, that doesn’t make any noise anyway, I’ve got a rowing machine, some weights, a dartboard and a putting mat. But that doesn’t even spit the ball back, I have to go and fetch it. I’ve got my bikes on the wall and a picture of me and Steve Harmison.
If I lived in Italy or Greece, I reckon I’d end up being one of those old blokes who sits out in the sun all day. I understand that completely. As it is, I’m not too far off jumping in the car, driving to the coast and staring at the sea for hours on end. I wouldn’t even get out of the car, I’d just stare through the windscreen, probably while rain was lashing against it. I used to find people doing things like that a mystery, but I get it now. I’m not sure I like that I get it, but I do.
Let’s face it, the future is my dad. He goes fishing. He never catches anything, but it’s not about the fish, like growing vegetables isn’t about the vegetables. He goes through all the rigmarole of setting everything up, and I assume he puts bait on his rod, but it’s not really about that. There’s just an understanding that when he says he’s going fishing, that’s code for, ‘I just want some time on my own, and I will be gone for a set period of time.’
I can’t see myself ever becoming a keen angler, but I’ve joined a golf club. In fact, I’ve joined two. But when it comes to golf, my biggest decision isn’t which clubs I should waste my money on. It’s, ‘Should I get a normal push trolley or an electric one?’ The thing is, the push trolley is fine for now. But maybe in five or six years, I’ll need one with a bit of power, for the hills. As it is, I always hire a power caddy, one of those buggies that moves on its own. Like a golf Dalek. But I can never get it on the right setting, so that it matches the speed of my walk. I’m always either lagging slightly behind or it’s trying to catch me up. If I was being paranoid, I’d think it didn’t like me. Surely things haven’t got that advanced, where power caddies are so intelligent they can throw strops?
Right, Said Fred Page 12
