It seems cricketer-turned-TV star Freddie Flintoff was lucky to survive his crash in a Morgan three-wheeled roadster in December 2022, and his recuperation has been painful and traumatic. As he explained in the opening episode of his second Field of Dreams series, the accident, which occurred during filming for Top Gear, is going to have long-term consequences. “I struggle with anxiety. I have nightmares, I have flashbacks. It’s been so hard to cope with.”
He also had to undergo a series of operations, and didn’t appear in public for many months. But he was determined to continue with his Field of Dreams show, in which he mentors a group of youths from his home town of Preston and introduces them to the joys of cricket. Before he was so rudely interrupted, he’d been preparing to take the boys to India, the world’s most cricket-crazy nation (“Are we travelling in business class?” asked Sean, the cheekiest of Flintoff’s chappies, pictured below). It was more than a year later when he was finally able to get the show back on the road, transporting his aspiring players to Kolkata. “Of course we’re a motley crew, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he chortled.
The episode broke into two halves, before and after the crash. In the first part, we saw Fred and his assistant coach Kyle Hogg taking the lads for a weekend at the National Cricket Performance Centre at Loughborough, where the various England sides train, in an attempt to equip them with a few basic skills. For some of them, managing to bowl a ball without it veering into the net next door would be an achievement, and Fred had to lay down a little bit of law about discipline and timekeeping. One of his great gifts is his straightforward, firm-but-fair approach (it’s odd that he wasn’t able to make a bigger success of his stint as England captain), and his decree that “either we nip this in the bud or things will change” seemed to hit home.
The accident threw it all up in the air. He successfully got the India visit back on track – though realpolitik intervened when a couple of his players from a Pakistani background were denied visas by the Indian authorities – but as well as nurturing the team, Flintoff found that he was also trying to apply a bit of healing balm to himself. He confessed that getting on the plane and facing the challenge of the trip left him feeling insecure and homesick, but once they got going he felt himself getting wrapped up in the mystique of the Summer Game all over again. “I’m reaching out to cricket, I suppose, to help me,” he pondered.
A fundamental problem with Fred’s team is that they’re basically pretty useless, apart from their prodigious Afghan import Adnan (pictured right), and as he pointed out, “We need to find the worst cricketers in Kolkata and ask ’em for a game.” They were saved by a local resident who suggested they have a go at “gully cricket”, a popular street version of the game (using a tennis ball) where the rules are adapted to local conditions.
This proved to be an excellent means of breaking his troops in gently, though inevitably they got thrashed by the locals. Meanwhile the lads were gobsmacked by the sights, sounds and smells of India, and even tried a bit of haggling at the local market when they went shopping for some dinner. Three more episodes to go…
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