But I don’t even know where most of my England caps and jumpers are. Mum’s got a few, and the boys love the Sports Personality of the Year and World Player of the Year trophies. But I didn’t play for them; winning awards was never my ambition. All I wanted to do was win trophies for Lancashire and the Ashes for England. That was enough.
I see people I work with begging for votes on social media, for this or that programme, and it baffles me. When we won a Bafta for A League of their Own, I stayed at home, watched Game of Thrones and found out on Twitter. We won three Aria awards for the podcast, but I already knew we were doing a decent job, because I could see the listening figures and download numbers. I could see it meant a lot to Robbie, which is why I went along with him to the ceremony, but I couldn’t have cared less. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to win, because I really enjoy doing the podcast and am proud of what we do. But having to go up onstage and receive the awards was just embarrassing. Maybe if I won an Oscar or a Bafta for acting I’d think differently. Can you imagine me crying like Gwyneth Paltrow? I think the speech would go something like, ‘I don’t do it for the awards and adulation, I do it for the people…’
Awards are subjective, and I don’t like anything that’s subjective. I like black and white, win or lose. People’s opinions of what I’ve done isn’t important to me, apart from maybe my mum’s. Being on TV and doing fun things is the privilege, because they’re things people would cut their arms off to do. That’s why I feel like I have a responsibility to enjoy what I do. I struggle sometimes, because it’s never what I set out to be. I’ll do a show and everyone will be buzzing, but I’ll be thinking, ‘I just want to go home now.’ There’s even a part of me that feels like I don’t deserve it. But I do enjoy it, in my own way. And that should be why you do anything, not because you might win an award at the end of it.
I’ve heard celebrities having these deep discussions about who should be knighted, or given this award or that medal, and I just think, ‘These shouldn’t be going to people who act or sing or cycle around France every summer, these should be going to people who make a real difference’, like doctors and nurses in A&E or people grafting in laboratories trying to find the cure for cancer. The people who clean our sewers or collect our rubbish are more valuable to society than a bloke who runs around for a living.
My dad was a plumber by trade and then worked for British Aerospace on a machine. It was proper work, and that’s why I didn’t ask them to come to Buckingham Palace when I got my MBE. They would have loved it, and the fact I didn’t is one of the few genuine regrets I have in life. I had three tickets, but ended up just taking my missus. I found it all a bit embarrassing.
Only six weeks after regaining the Ashes, we’d lost a Test series in Pakistan. We got found out, because we weren’t working hard enough. I’d turned up a stone overweight, and I wasn’t the only one. Factions had started appearing in the dressing room, you could just tell things weren’t right.
When it really hit me was after the final Test in Lahore. All the lads who played in the Ashes series were summoned to the team room and in walked the high commissioner, who said, ‘I’ve got some good news, Her Majesty has bestowed awards upon you in her New Year’s Honours.’ This fella went around the room, reading our names and full addresses out, asking us if we wanted to accept, and obviously we all said yes. But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This is all well and good, but we’ve just had our pants pulled down.’
The whole thing just felt absurd, especially because I didn’t think I should have been getting an award at all. Duncan Fletcher, the coach, got an OBE. Come on! He just picked the team! The skipper, Michael Vaughan, got an OBE as well, for moving the fielders around. Paul Collingwood got an MBE for scoring 17 runs in the final Test. Was he embarrassed? Bollocks was he! He was the first to accept it. Seventeen runs and he was cracking the champagne open. If I was him, I would have rejected it as a matter of principle. Instead of joining in, I left them to it. It was then that I realised that the team had real problems.
I’d love to be honoured by my country again, somewhere down the line, but for something more important than just hitting a ball. When I’m old and sitting in front of the fire with a rug over my legs, I’d like to be able to look at a medal I was given and think, ‘You know what, I’m really proud of what I did to get that.’ But I don’t even know where my MBE is. I know my mum gave it to my Auntie Joan for a bit, God bless her. Auntie Joan looked like Richie Benaud, but she was a great woman and used to spoil me and my cousins rotten. After she started losing her memory, I went round to visit her in her little bungalow and she was sat there in her chair with my MBE on her chest. I said to her, ‘What you got on?’ She said, ‘It’s my MBE. Have you got one?’
CHAPTER 10
HARD, FAST AND SHORT OF A LENGTH
A fine romance
I’m not a romantic. I try to be, but I’m not very good at it. Whenever I try to be romantic, things backfire. I’m from Preston, we don’t really do romance up here. In fact, I don’t really know what is romance and what is just stupid. There are certain subjects I’m good at, and other subjects where I’m firmly in the bottom set. As far as romance is concerned, I’m the kid at the back of the class eating worms and wearing a dunce’s hat.
You’ve got to remember that as a kid growing up, I was a cricketer. Try to woo a girl by telling them you play cricket and she won’t show a flicker of interest. It’s nothing like telling them you’re a professional footballer or rugby player. Oh, and I also played chess. I found that most girls found boys who were into football sexy, as well as boys who took drugs and boys who beat people up. I wasn’t into any of that. Girls found cricketers about as sexy as chlamydia.
Suffice to say I didn’t have much of a romantic grounding as a teenager. As a kid, I was useless, shy and virtually mute. I always liked girls but didn’t know what to do. I’m surprised I ever lost my virginity. When I played my first second team game for Lancashire, I was in the dressing room and Joanna Lumley came on the telly. She was advertising yoghurt, and at one point she licked the lid. The coach said, ‘Would you?’ I thought he was talking about licking yoghurt off the lid, so I replied, ‘I wouldn’t just lick it off the lid, I’d lick it straight from the pot.’ My first trip away with the second team, the lads set me up with this woman in a nightclub. At one point I thought I’d moved to second base, so to speak, and when I looked down I had my finger in a bottle of Hooch. That’s how naive I was.
The lads used to send me into the petrol garage to buy porn mags. I’d walk in, wearing my full Lancashire tracksuit, and walk out with about 20 of them. The people behind the counter must have thought I was a proper wrong ’un. When I got back to the team bus, all the lads would be on tenterhooks: ‘Have you got ’em? Did you remember to get Razzle?’ Nowadays, kids can find everything out on the internet. There are online courses that teach you to play the piano in 20 days, but kids can be experts in sex in less than that. Magazines were all well and good, but they didn’t show you what to do. That said, I’m not sure the modern idea of what sex is supposed to be like is healthy. For a start, you don’t normally have someone watching in the real world. And it’s not every day you do it in the street or on top of a car. These aren’t prerequisites for sex, but I have a horrible feeling some kids think they are.
I lost my virginity when I was 17. I was out with some lads in the Phoenix nightclub in Manchester, got talking to this Indian medical student and, before I knew it, I was kissing her outside the fire exit. She was 23, I told her I was 19. We went back to her place, fell into her bedroom and everything started going wrong. I had a condom on me, but I couldn’t get it on. I was trying to pull it on like a sock. In a state of blind panic, I staggered out into the hallway, was leaning against the wall, trying to compose myself, when the front door opened and her brother walked in. I bade him a cheery hello before falling back into the bedroom and resuming operations. After some very amateurish fumbling on my part, she said, ‘Have
you done this before?’ I replied, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve done it a few times, don’t you worry about that…’ Technically, I don’t think I lost my virginity that night, because no part of it was anywhere near where it was supposed to be. Not much different to my Test debut. I’m no good at debuts full stop. I take a while to get my eye in.
I had my 40th birthday party at the Ocean Beach club in Ibiza. Everywhere you looked there were women in bikinis and if it had been my 21st birthday party, it would have been the best place ever. But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘All these girls are some blokes’ daughters.’ If my daughter was wandering around a nightclub in a bikini, it would kill me. I was in Scotland, filming the fish and chip programme, and one of the young kids from production was in the van with me. He saw this girl walk past in a very short skirt and his tongue was hanging out of his head. My first thought was, ‘I bet she’s got cold legs…’
* * *
When I first started going out with Rachael, I came in one night at about 3:30 a.m. and handed her a kebab. She was over the moon. It wasn’t really the kebab that made her happy, it was the fact that I was thinking of her. We sat and ate our kebabs together in bed, and it was a beautiful moment. But the course of love hasn’t always run so smoothly.
Before I met Rachael, I’d been seeing this other girl for years. Christmas Eve 2001, I returned from a Test series in India and it had been planned that we’d do our Christmas shopping and spend Christmas Day at my mum and dad’s. But when I arrived at Manchester airport, nobody had turned up to collect me. When I phoned my girlfriend, she wouldn’t answer. Eventually I jumped in a cab and when I got home my girlfriend was waiting for me, but to say the reception was a bit frosty is an understatement. I went shopping on my own and bought her a diamond bracelet, but when I gave it to her on Christmas morning, along with her other presents, I got nothing back. So I went to my mum and dad’s on my own.
I had no contact with her for about a fortnight, and when I came back, I opened the door and it was like I’d been burgled. Almost everything had gone, the place was like a shell. I went upstairs and the bacon butty and cup of tea I’d made her on Christmas morning were still there, going mouldy, as was her Christmas card. Funnily enough, the diamond bracelet was gone.
I had to go back to India the following day for a one-day series, and for the first couple of weeks I was quite down about the whole situation. Then I started to think, ‘This is an opportunity more than anything.’ I started going to the gym, got fit and put myself back on the market. The cricket was going well, off the field was going well, and when we moved on to New Zealand, things got even better.
In Hamilton, I got a message under the door of my hotel room, from the local police. It said: ‘Ring your fiancée.’ I phoned her and she said, ‘Andrew, I made a mistake…’ So I replied, ‘Yes, I think you have. I’m on tour with England, I’ve got myself in shape and I’m having an absolute ball…’
Problem was, I got done by the News of the World for going out with a couple of girls while I was in New Zealand. I’d had plenty of stories written about me before that were complete bollocks, but this one was absolutely spot-on. The reporter had obviously been following me all night. He knew what we’d eaten, what wine we’d drunk, that we’d ended up in a jacuzzi on the roof of the hotel. Now my ex has really got the hump, so when I finally get home, I discover she’s emptied our joint account, so that I’m pretty much skint. On top of that, she’s sold her story to the News of the World and the journalist who wrote it has phoned my parents for a comment.
On the Saturday of the second Test of the summer against Sri Lanka in Birmingham, I met Rachael. I saw her in the executive box and thought, ‘She’s nice, I’d love to talk to her.’ I got her number, sent her a text and signed off with ‘Fred’. She replied with, ‘Who’s Fred?’ I had to explain that I was the chubby England cricketer with a skinhead. I met her in the bar after the day’s play, it went well, so I asked if she fancied a bite to eat on Sunday evening because it looked like the match was going to finish early. Luckily, she said yes.
On the Sunday morning, I was walking towards the dressing room and I could hear people sniggering and whispering, ‘He’s here! He’s here!’ When I went in, everyone was sitting there reading the News of the World. I asked them what they were reading, and somebody said, ‘It’s about you!’ They gleefully showed me the article and the headline read: ‘FLINTOFF’S LOVEMAKING LIKE HIS BOWLING – HARD, FAST AND SHORT OF LENGTH’. I’m told the actual story was far worse.
I had to go out and field and bowl, and the skipper Michael Vaughan put me out in front of the bouncy stand, so that I was getting hammered all day by the crowd. When Ashley Giles took the final wicket to wrap up the win, I was the most relieved man in Birmingham. That night, I asked Rachael if she’d read any press about me recently, and she said she’d read a lovely piece about me in The Times. A few drinks later, she admitted she’d seen the story about me in the News of the World. She didn’t mind, we had a laugh about it, but the article left a lingering scar that would come bursting open later that summer.
Because Rachael worked for Npower, who were sponsoring the cricket, we started seeing more and more of each other, and when we played in Manchester, she was going to stay with me, to take the relationship to another level, so to speak. But because I was worried about living up to my reputation, as laid out in the News of the World, I phoned my old mate Paddy in Liverpool and asked if he could get hold of a few Viagra tablets. He got me three of them.
The plan was that Rachael was going to meet some friends on the Saturday, have a few drinks, then come back and meet me at the Marriott. So when we finished that day’s play, I was right on the edge. I had a pint in the dressing room, went back to the hotel, had another pint with the lads, retired to my room, popped a Viagra, watched Coronation Street and had another couple of pints. At nine o’clock, Rachael still hadn’t turned up, so I popped another Viagra. It got to eleven o’clock and she still hadn’t turned up, so I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll pop another one, just to counteract the booze.’ Half an hour later, every part of me was stiff. I was sweating, in a right pickle, so when she finally rocked up at about one in the morning, I told her I had a headache.
When I woke up the next morning, I was still stiff all over, and the bloody thing wouldn’t go down. I’m driving to the ground, listening to Steve Wright’s Love Songs, and it just refuses to crumple. And when I arrive at the ground, it’s still standing to attention. I’m in the dressing room, trying to put my whites on and having to hold it to one side. I go out for warm-ups with a hand in my pocket, and when someone asks if I want to have a bat, I have to hold the bat with my top hand and stuff my other hand down my trousers.
I’m batting six, so when we lose a couple of wickets, I think I’d better go and put my kit on. But I can’t put my box on properly, so have to balance it on top. We lose another couple of wickets, and it’s my turn to bat. In a panic, I tuck it into the waistband of my undies and leave the box off. I get announced on the tannoy – ‘Next in, Lancashire’s own Andrew Flintoff!’ – the crowd goes up and I’m walking out like a penguin. A minute later, I’m standing at the crease, this fast bowler Fernando, who’s really quite rapid, is running towards me, and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve not got a box on, I’ve got a full-blown erection and I’m playing for England on my home ground. What on earth is going on here?’
I manage to score one run before Alec Stewart hits it back towards me, I’m out of my ground, and the ball flicks the bowler’s hand. So now I’ve got a split-second decision to make: if the ball hits the stumps, I’m out. But if I make a dive for it, I might snap my old fella in half. Worse, it might fall out. So I just stand there instead, and am run out by a mile. When I get back to the dressing room, Duncan Fletcher, the coach, is seething. He says to me, ‘What the hell was that?’ I reply, ‘I’m a bit stiff, Duncan…’ At least I told the truth.
While I was sitting in the dressing room, contemplating yet another ridiculous situat
ion in my life, it finally subsided. But because I was waiting on a hernia operation, I had to have treatment every day. So Dean Conway, this 19-stone Welsh physio, is working on my groin and it suddenly goes up again, like an inflatable toy. So I say, ‘Dean, it’s not you. Let me tell you a story…’
CHAPTER 11
NUMBER TWO IN A BAG
The daft things I’ve done
Then there was the time I pooed my pants at Lord’s. Me and Darren Gough, being a bit on the chubby side, were always trying to lose weight, any way we could. So when these Xenical pills came on the market, we both got stuck in, like they were Smarties. When you take one of these pills, it separates the fat from the food, which is horrible when it comes out. It’s supposed to encourage you to eat better, but me and Goughie thought popping a few Xenical meant we could eat whatever we wanted.
There was one major problem with Xenical – when you had wind and trumped, you were in serious trouble. So I was sat there in the dressing room at Lord’s, I farted and it all came tumbling out. The boys are already out in the middle, and I’m next into bat. So I’m thinking, ‘If either of them gets out, what do I do? I’ve just cacked my pants. I can’t go out like this at Lord’s, the home of cricket. What would WG Grace say?’
In the corner of the dressing room is a sink, so I whip everything off, sit in the sink and wash myself, while I’m trying to watch the game through the window, in case anyone gets out. Nasser Hussain, the skipper, is looking at me like I’ve just crawled out from under the skirting board. Goughie is rolling about on the floor laughing. Luckily, I’m pulling my pants back up just as it’s my turn to go out and bat. Even more luckily, I score a few runs. I think Nasser saw the funny side eventually.
Do You Know What? Page 9