Flintoff's role needs rethinking

England didn’t deserve to escape from the Gabba with a draw, and when Kevin Pietersen departed in the first over, the last faint hope went with him. Australia were far too good. They shrugged off the hype and found the strength to play their natural game; England didn’t.

The team with four bowlers took 20 wickets. The team with five bowlers took only 10 wickets, one of them a run-out. England had one more bowler than in their last series – a world-class one, Andrew Flintoff – yet they bowled decidedly worse. While the batsmen found their feet by the end of the match, the bowlers remained lost.

Flintoff was England’s best bowler by a mile, but that doesn’t mean his role should go unexamined. When a players is given three jobs, something has to give. With England’s last two allrounder captains, Ian Botham in 1980 and Alec Stewart in 1998-99, it was the batting that suffered. Botham kept on trying to do everything, won no Tests, and resigned after a year; Stewart gave up the wicketkeeping gloves after three Tests, found some batting form, and was sacked all the same, two Tests (and one botched World Cup) later.

Flintoff is being asked to be a top-six batsman, the main strike bowler, and the captain. For the first ball of this match, he also found himself keeping wicket. It’s just too much. As the bowling is so ropey, that has to be his main suit. On the past two years’ form, he was already a bowling allrounder, and now that is even more true.

A Cricinfo reader called Toby posted a comment over the weekend, saying (about six times): “Flintoff is not good enough to bat at six”. Toby is on to something. “Not good enough” is overstating it, because Flintoff has made several hundreds there, including a match-winning one against Australia. But substitute “not good enough” with “too stretched” and the point has some force. Flintoff played a tired shot in the first innings and a rash one in the second. He needs a licence to be rash, and it was a sign of his mental strength that he wasn’t inhibited by the captaincy. But the performance didn’t add up to that of a no.6.