As part of a remarkable series of interviews exploring the variously challenged lives of former cricketers, Andrew Flintoff opens up to Felix White about dealing with life when the game is over.
You can read all 11 interviews from Felix White’s When The Day Is Done feature in issue 152 of All Out Cricket magazine.
Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff is one of the most beloved England cricketers of the century. Most famous for his performances in the 2005 Ashes, for which he won the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, he played 79 Tests, scoring 3,845 runs at 31.77 with the bat and took 226 wickets at 32.78 with the ball.
Now carving out a career in television, I meet Freddie at the offices of MS Saatchi, his management company. He is in another meeting when I arrive and gestures through the transparent office windows on arrival that he’ll be five. When the meeting ends, he takes me into a smaller office, adorned with a big cardboard cut-out of himself. We are stopped an hour in as he has to be taken to a television awards show that evening, which he has expressed a keen disinterest in being involved in at least twice during our interview.
I was keen to speak to Fred as both Kyle Hogg and Mark Butcher had mentioned how hard retirement had hit him. Butch had also cited Freddie, accurately, as the last really marketable personality, to take the game outside of itself. I wondered whether the man English cricket had relied upon to broaden its own horizons wanted in fact nothing more than to just be back inside it.
When he, at one point casting back on how he feels on his career, says, ‘I wasn’t the best’, I want to hug him and tell him, ‘No Freddie, you WERE the best!’ I’m struck by how lucid and well-structured his feelings about life after cricket are, and that he has reached some kind of place of painful and disarmingly honest acceptance with it. The revelation that the door to WWE is still open to him is somehow, for Fred, not that big a surprise, making him to my knowledge the cricketer that has come closest to wrestling The Undertaker in the history of the game.
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I left school at 16, I’d started playing with Lancashire second team by then. I got my GCSEs and the initial plan was that I was going to go to college and see what happened. But I got offered a three-year contract, and that year I played a Lancashire second-team game and got paid 60 quid for a four-day game, plus 20 quid petrol money for my dad. It was only then that I realised that you got paid to play cricket. I didn’t realise you got paid. I didn’t know what people did for jobs, but when I got the money I thought, ‘This is what I want to do’. I never really got past the thought of playing cricket.
I started off playing cricket because I liked it. I wanted to play for Lancashire and England. I never said I wanted to score this amount of runs or whatever. You can look at my career in two ways. The cynics will say that I underachieved. But I look at where I came from, schools on council estates, where you’d get beat up for playing cricket. It’s even to the point where you went out and got sledged by the Aussies and you’d be, ‘Hang on a minute, men dressed in whites, look at you! Come back to Preston, come and have a look here…’ I achieved more than I ever thought I was going to. I look back and think, ‘Yeah, I did alright’.
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Sometimes I would say to myself, ‘What a dick – it’s only retiring from cricket, there’s nothing wrong with me’.
I’m not ill, you see all these people, battling illness or going through real hardship, then you feel guilty that you’re struggling mentally or whatever it may be. That makes it worse, because you feel guilty for it too. It’s just living life differently now, but I’m enjoying it.
Now that I’m not a professional cricketer, I’m a better person. My perception of life is better. Everyone says you need to be selfish to be a sportsman and I always thought I wasn’t. I wasn’t in the traditional sense. I always put the team first, it was always about winning, not personal performance. But where I was selfish was, if we won, I’d go out with the lads. And if we lost, I’d go back to the missus and have a sulk on. When you’re playing a Test match, everyone’s on egg shells around you. I think that’s where I was selfish. I think competition brings the best out of me but also the worst. It’s win at all costs. Now I don’t have that in my life, I shy away from confrontation. I think I’m a lot easier to be around.
