The Trouble With Freddie

How do you solve a problem like dear Fre-ddie?

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?

How do you find a word that means Fre-ddie?

A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!

(With thanks, and profuse apologies, to Rodgers and Hammerstein)

How do you solve a problem like Andrew Flintoff? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? Such is the knotty problem that the new England selectorial team, under lone survivor Geoff Miller, will be attempting to unravel this summer. Good luck, lads.

The headline news is that The Artist Alternately And Affectionately Known As Freddie, The Fredster, Fab Freddie, Mr InFredible and sundry other nicknames has recovered from his latest career-threatening ankle operation. He is acquiring match fitness with Lancashire and says he is eager to return to the international fray. Over the coming days, as they sit down to select a squad for next week’s first Test against New Zealand, Miller and his compadres will decide whether he knows what’s best for him.

As a noted, successful and highly amusing after-dinner speaker, Miller has spent the past two decades regaling folk with his fact-meets-fictional stories of the icons he played alongside in the 1970s and 1980s – Ian Botham, Derek Randall, Mike Brearley and so on. More than most, he will recognise the need to give individuals their head.

But will Miller, Ashley Giles and James Whittaker, none of them lovers of orthodoxy, act on the proposal of Michael Vaughan, who believes Flintoff should return next Thursday, for his first Test since January 2007? Perhaps the question should be rephrased. Should they pick him?

Peter Moores, England’s flexible and sometimes lateral-thinking coach, recently described wicketkeepers as the drummer of the team. It made sense up to a point – the best, after all, are mostly Ringos and Charlies. They support the Johns and Pauls, the Micks and Keefs, maintaining the pulse, eschewing flash and excess, seldom if ever drawing attention to themselves.

On the other hand, some drummers, admittedly an extremely elite band, are as important as the guitarists and singers, responsible for mood as well as rhythm. Led Zeppelin’s John “Bonzo” Bonham and Billy Cobham of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, say, but none more so than the late Keith “The Loon” Moon, the force of nature who propelled The Who; the only lead drummer in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. He may not be quite as potty or unrestrained – for all their mutual fondness for alcohol and messing about with cars and other forms of transport - but Flintoff is England’s Moon. At his best, he dictates mood and rhythm, invigorates and revives. And, just as The Who were never the same after Moon began his riches-fuelled descent towards a horribly if inevitably early grave, so England have not been the same since Freddie the National Icon celebrated winning the Ashes with a major bender and re-emerged as Freddie the Flawed Hero. Or was that Botham Incarnate? Let’s just call him Post-Oval Freddie (POF).

Almost from the moment he made his maiden Test century at Christchurch in 2002, Flintoff, after an apprenticeship the likes of David Capel would have killed for, was cast as the New Botham. Or, more to the point, the first bonafide New Botham. Up to that point, he wasn’t even the New Geoff Miller. Not only had he mustered just 259 runs in 20 innings with a top score of 42 and five ducks; his 241.5 overs had only once yielded more than two wickets in an innings. But now he’d turned his first 50 into a century while helping Graham Thorpe set a new English sixth-wicket record. The door had been smashed down. And his hooks and drives, not his yorkers and bouncers, had done the smashing.

Nor did the bowling take off immediately, at least not in Tests. Not for another two years would he record his first five-for, and that was the first time he’d taken more than three in an innings since Christchurch, though the prolific form of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard reduced the opportunities for eye-catching returns. From that name-making second innings at Lancaster Park until the end of the 2005 Ashes series, however, he racked up 2383 Test runs at 40.39, smacking all five of his hundreds to date.

While England were putting together their best run since Ray Illingworth’s 1968-71 combo – 20 wins, four defeats and six draws in the 30 Tests spanning Trent Bridge 2003 and The Oval 2005 – the original Freddie hoovered up 1905 runs at 45 and 109 wickets at 25. The game had no more magnetic all-round entertainer. As with Botham over the first five years of his Test career, the two parts of his game fed off each other in a virtuous circle: runs begat wickets, wickets begat runs.

Since then, packaging has surpassed content. In 16 five-dayers since that Ashes-resolving spell in Australia’s first innings at Kennington (excluding the ill-christened but personally rather super “Super Test” for the Rest of the World against the Aussies) POF has cobbled together 47 wickets at 33, hampered by that blasted ankle, yes, but also, perhaps, diminished by that increasingly porous and brittle bat.

In four subsequent series, only against India in early 2006, when he passed 42 in each of his five innings and averaged 52.80, has he hit his weight. His last eight Tests have brought 301 runs at 25, with two half-centuries, both, admittedly, against Australia. He says he still regards himself, as he always has, as a batting allrounder, but it’s hard to see why. In 12 of his innings during that run he failed to last 65 minutes and only once faced more than 70 balls. Determined and persistent he may be, but patience, the Test cricketer’s greatest asset, never has been an obvious virtue.

Yesterday’s play at Old Trafford was all too typical of POF. A hesitant prod to slip and a first-ball duck, inflicted by a journeyman, Mark Davies. It was his second blob of a summer that has so far seen six innings and a high of 27 not out. Then, though, came a flurry of bouncers, yorkers and swingers worth 4 for 14. No matter that three-quarters of the victims were tailenders. Lancashire, snuffed out for 143 before tea on day one against Durham, had gained an improbable first-innings lead of 29. That wand is still capable of a vigorous wave. Or is it?

You know where this is heading, don’t you? By the end of the Old Trafford Ashes Test of 1981, Botham had played 40 Tests, the fruits 1958 runs at 33 with eight hundreds; 192 wickets at a smidge under 21; the fastest “double” in Test annals and any number of miraculous catches. His remaining 62 Tests, ie. more than 60% of his five-day career, were a good deal less fruitful.

Granted, there were 191 wickets, but they cost nigh-on 36 apiece. And if there were hopes that the back problems that tempered his threat with the ball would be counter-balanced by a maturing bat, these were roundly and rapidly dashed. His last 38 Tests brought but a solitary three-figure score. By the end it was almost embarrassing, the most painfully prolonged of goodbyes. All-too frequently recalled by despairing selectors in the fanciful hope that a vestige of sorcery remained at those beefy fingertips, his last 23 outings, spanning more than six years, amounted to 791 runs at just under 24 and 40 wickets at almost 46.

Yet the parallel with Flintoff is not so much the career graph. Botham went off like a bullet, sustained a phenomenal double-barrelled assault for five years, then gradually fell away to the point where opponents, by and large, were only ever beaten by his past, by reputation. Flintoff began slowly, had a 30-Test spell comparable with his predecessor’s best, then slowed down again. Whether he can come again may well depend on whether he can be sterner with himself than Botham, not to mention a better listener, which is where the most telling parallel comes in.

Knowing his back was never going to allow him to bend it consistently after that fiery but sapping 1985 Ashes campaign, Botham had a choice: try and bluster through, still firing with both barrels, or focus on batting, build on an essentially orthodox technique and become a more consistent, if mellower, producer at No.5. Who were we kidding? That he took the first option, the easier option, was inevitable. It was a natural consequence of that competitive instinct, that thirst to be in the thick of it at all times and yes, that ego. Few dared to try and dissuade him.

POF has only a slightly different dilemma. His form this fresh season, unwise as it is to draw too many conclusions from county performances, suggests that the belly still has some fire to burn. He may yet have a future as a first-change seamer, deployed in short spells to rough up the opposition. It may even be that he will ultimately retire from Tests and devote himself to a less demanding diet. But one suspects he could also have a far longer future as a batting allrounder, as a Test No.5 or 6 – he only turned 30 in December - if he applied himself with the sort of commitment that saw him shed stones and bad habits to turn his career around in 2001-02.

Vaughan, not unreasonably, believes his chum should play next week as a fourth seamer and bat at No.7. This is not ludicrous by any means, even if it does presuppose that wicketkeeper Tim Ambrose, with three Tests behind him, is a Test No.6. Some cheap and restorative wickets against a suspect New Zealand top order could refuel the run tank. Others would urge caution. With Ryan Sidebottom and Stuart Broad at their beck and call, and probably a revitalised Hoggard, England don’t – or shouldn’t – have too much need of a fifth front-line bowler against the Kiwis, so why not give POF a target? Get your head down, score some big runs for Lancashire, then come back, both barrels blazing again, against South Africa.

To pick POF now would send out the wrong signal. It would say, in effect: don’t worry about the runs - we’d prefer to have you bowling at full-pelt in next year’s Ashes than help you consider a change of tack that could prolong your shelf-life. The interests of team and individual should be the same, but in this instance there is a danger that what’s good for England in the short term may not be good for POF over the long haul. Whether he sees it quite like that, of course, is another matter altogether.

The key question, then, is this: is he cut from the same cloth as Botham? Even Brian Close had trouble making His Beefiness listen. Flintoff is more humble, less prone to bullishness in china shops. He listened to his agent and manager when he was overweight and underachieving. It took sharp words and plenty of home truths, and it had the desired impact. But has anybody tried anything similar since? The evidence is not plentiful.

The final word belongs to another larger-than-life character whose name begins with an F and ends in a double f – Shakespeare’s Falstaff: “The better part of discretion is valour.” Flintoff is as brave as Falstaff was cowardly, so my money’s on POF becoming Fab Freddie again. Eventually.