Do You Know What?

by Andrew Flintoff

I first played for Lancashire’s second team when I was only 15. I’d played for Lancashire Under-15s the day before, and this old boy called John Savage, who was a scout, asked if I was available. I told him to speak to my dad, my dad said yes, and the following morning I turned up at Old Trafford for a three-day game against Glamorgan with a load of professional cricketers.

  I just wanted to play cricket, and when I had a bat or ball in my hands, I probably seemed quite manly. But I was really quiet and innocent in many ways, there was nothing worldly about me. I walked in the dressing room and some of the lads were all right, but some of them seemed a bit put out that this spotty teenager was in their team.

  I didn’t have a helmet, so I walked out to bat in an England Schools cap, which one of their fast bowlers tried to knock off. I scored 20-odd, got overconfident, tried to smack one over the top and got caught. Not bad for a 15-year-old, but the chat in the dressing room – about booze and birds and sex – was a complete mystery. But at the end of the game, someone handed me an envelope, I opened it and there was 60 quid inside. I thought, ‘I get paid to play cricket?’ As soon as I’d done my GCSEs, I dropped everything else, because all I wanted to be was a cricketer.

  A few weeks later, I had my first trip away with the second team, down in London. I sat at the front, in my shirt, tie and blazer, and all the old pros piled down the back with this big cooler full of beer. Before we’d reached Stoke, I was six cans in and had my tie wrapped around my head. All three days got rained off, and back then you didn’t do anything if play was abandoned. So I spent my time in the bookies, betting on dogs and horses with my meal money, before heading to a nightclub with the rest of the team. When I got home, I had to speak in assembly about my experiences. Obviously, I lied through my arse. I’m not sure the teachers would have appreciated stories about fingering a bottle of Hooch in a nightclub.

  My second game was against Kent, and I batted against Richard Ellison, who had played about 400 games for his county and 11 Tests for England. He had this big eighties’ tache, big permed hair, and was still angry, despite being more than twice my age. First ball he teed right up, I smacked him for four through the covers and he came down the pitch and started chuntering at me. Second ball, exactly the same thing. I was thinking, ‘Tee it up again, and I’ll smack you again. What else am I supposed to do?’ And that’s what happened.

  I just wanted to be accepted, but it was an intimidating environment for a 15-year-old. Grown men were coating me because I was a virgin and had no pubes. I wouldn’t have a shower, because I was embarrassed. People thought it would be funny to show me up in front of women. They’d call them over, introduce me and I’d be going bright red and sweating. It toughened me up, but none of that would be allowed now, quite rightly. I wouldn’t want my boys to see and hear some of the stuff I saw and heard in the dressing room.

  When I started playing for the first team, I got my head down and didn’t really speak. That all changed on an end-of-season trip to Guernsey, when I was 17 or 18. I scored a hundred, which I thought was a big deal, but it was really just a lash-up. Afterwards, my teammates started playing drinking games with Guinness. I started out with Coke but got sick of it after a few glasses and switched to the black stuff, like the other lads. It turned out I was good at drinking. I had ten pints that night and suddenly I was one of the gang.

  Being part of the gang meant being party to the dressing-room banter. When I first started playing for Lancashire’s second team, it was full of average players, lads in their late teens and early 20s who thought they were on the verge of making it but who were never going to be cricketers. They loved the lifestyle, drinking every night after playing, swanning around in their Lancashire kit. And all that bravado made the dressing room a horrible place at times. If anyone had a fault, however minor, people would jump all over it. And if someone jumped all over you, you had to jump all over them, to show you had something about you.

  It was a tough school, nasty at times. I remember me and my best mate Paddy playing for the Under-19s against the second team, and when we went out to bat, they started abusing us. I was a pro at the time, supposedly one of them. Paddy’s a Scouser, a proper hard bloke, so he turned around to me and said, ‘Are we gonna have this or not?’ I replied, ‘Yeah, whatever you do, I’ll go with you.’ We didn’t take a backward step, hit them all over the park, and Paddy would deliberately hit the bowlers with his bat as he ran past. Me and Paddy were kindred spirits, looked after each other. In that kind of environment, you needed people in the dressing room who had your back.

  Then again, you couldn’t even trust your best mates. I played one game for the second team, scored 30-odd, got out and was livid with myself. Rather than going straight to the dressing room, I went to the toilets, to have some time with myself and calm down a bit. I was sat in a cubicle, with my back to the door and my feet on the toilet, contemplating life, and once the anger had subsided, other things started entering my mind. I started playing a bit of absent-minded ‘pocket billiards’, and you know what it’s like when you’re young, things just happen that you hadn’t really planned.

  Suddenly, I had the sense that someone was watching me, before I saw Paddy’s head under the door and heard his thick Scouse accent: ‘All right there, Freddie lad?’ He went back to the dressing room, told everyone what he’d seen, and when I walked in they were all on the floor laughing. I was only 17, so didn’t know where to put myself. Even worse, Paddy told that story at my wedding. We’d just finished the profiteroles and Paddy got up and started saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you know how some people get angry when they get out at cricket? Well, Freddie gets aroused…’ I could hear my nan talking to my auntie: ‘What did he say, Barbara? Something about billiards?’

  The dressing room is one of the places you miss most when you retire, it’s where adults can act like kids for eight hours a day. A lot of what went on was simply down to boredom. We had so much time to fill, we had to do something. So instead of studying for degrees, we’d get a bottle of Tabasco out and see how much we could drink. Another time, I drank 12 cans of Red Bull, just to see what it would do to me. But some of what went on in the dressing room was plain bullying, with no redeeming features. It had nothing to do with team bonding, it just made the person who was doing the bullying feel a bit better, and I found it was worse from the lesser players in the team.

  One day, I was playing at Middleton Cricket Club, was in the shower after close of play and could feel something warm running down my leg. Darren Shadford, who is one of the thickest people I have ever met, was pissing on me, laughing like an idiot. I just looked at him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Darren, I will get you back.’ And if I get it into my head that I’m going to do something, I will do it, whether it’s singing in a musical or gaining revenge on someone who’s pissed down my leg in the shower.

  A few months later, Darren walked out to bat on this baking hot day, I went into his locker, nicked his car keys, found a carrier bag, did a dump in it and tipped it into the passenger-door pocket of his brand-new, sponsored Rover 214. I didn’t tell anyone what I’d done, returned the keys to his locker and hung around in the car park after play had finished. As he was driving off, with all his windows wound down, I could hear him shouting, ‘Fuckin’ ’ell! It stinks in this car! Stinks!’

  The next day, Darren walked into the dressing room and was livid: ‘Who did that in me car? Who was that?’ Everyone else was looking at each other, but I had my head between my knees. Someone asked him what had happened, and he replied, in this wheezy Oldham accent, ‘Well, when I left Old Trafford, I went to pick the missus up from work. She got in the passenger seat, put her hand in the door pocket, where she keeps the humbugs, and pulled out a turd. Whoever did that is fuckin’ disgusting.’ At that point I decided to own it. I said, ‘Darren, I did tell you I’d get you back for pissing on me. I think we’re equal now…’ He erupted, but I said to him, ‘Mate, it’s up to you how we take it from here, but I suggest we just
leave it.’ And he did.

  Glen Chapple, my old Lancashire captain, was nicknamed the ‘Ginger Pig’, which he wasn’t a big fan of. Before the Open Championship at Birkdale in 2008, I went to this barbeque at Ernie Els’ house, because we had the same agent. He had this hog roast, and I persuaded the chef to give me the head. I got a taxi back to Altrincham, with this pig’s head in a carrier bag, got the cabbie to swing by Old Trafford, told the bloke on the gate I’d left something in the dressing room, broke into Glen’s locker and put this pig’s head in there, with his Lancashire cap on top. The following day, I went off with England. What I’d forgotten was that the Lancashire lads had four days off. When they came back in, this pig’s head had rotted away, the place stank and there were maggots and bluebottles everywhere. Unsurprisingly, Glen wasn’t impressed.

  They play pranks in the theatre, but they’re a bit tamer than shitting in people’s cars. In my first scene in Fat Friends, I had to open my lunch box and start eating a bag of crisps. One performance, someone put Tabasco on my crisps. Another performance, I opened my lunch box and saw a fake turd inside. For a second I thought, ‘Is Darren Shadford one of the stage crew?’

  Anyway, all these pranks jogged the old memory, so I got hold of this fake turd and thought I’d have some fun with it. In the final scene, me and Jodie get married, so I stuffed this fake turd into the bouquet of flowers she was holding, thinking, ‘When she throws it at the end, it’s going to be brilliant when it lands on someone.’ Instead, we were singing to each other in the middle of the stage and this turd fell out of the bouquet and onto the floor with a thud.

  Some of the old-stagers were horrified, and people in the front row were pointing at the turd with their hands over their mouths. But Sam Bailey looked like she was about to wet herself and Curly Watts was loving it as well. When the curtain came down, there was an inquest. The tour manager was on the stage, trying to find out who had put the turd in the bouquet, and suddenly what I thought was an innocent prank has turned into a bit of a thing. So I thought, ‘Never in the history of musical theatre has anyone seen anything like this, this will be talked about for years, I’m going to own it…’ They pulled me into the office and put me in the show report. I felt like saying, ‘Jesus, think yourselves lucky, not that long ago it would have been a real one…’

  Then again, gone are the days when I could go out after a game, throw eggs at a famous illusionist in a box and carry on the next day as if nothing had happened. That was a weird one. We’d played a game against South Africa, I got clattered at the ground and decided to head out into London. All the lads were in Chinawhite, which was a bit swanky for me and Harmy. I went to the bar, ordered a pint of lager and the barman said, ‘We don’t do pints, we do small glasses or bottles.’ So I bought a couple of small glasses, poured them into my boot and started drinking from it. Not long after that, me and Harmy had been kicked out by the bouncers.

  The next morning, my agent phoned and said, ‘We’ve had the Mirror on the phone. What were you up to last night?’

  ‘Oh, mate, I got chucked out of Chinawhite for drinking out of my boot. Sorry about that.’

  ‘No, not that. They said you were throwing eggs at David Blaine. You know who I mean, the illusionist bloke, who’s sitting in a box suspended above the Thames and is always on the news.’

  ‘Have they got any pictures?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Great, so I wasn’t then…’

  To be honest, I’m not sure if I was or not. When you’re drinking from your boot in Chinawhite, anything could have happened. But that was the end of it, the story never came out. This was before camera phones were everywhere, and you could get away with behaviour you’d never get away with now. There was only one jape I ever regretted, which involved drinks at the Sri Lanka high commissioner’s house, karaoke and Sambuca shots. I can’t really tell you the ending, except to say that my mum wouldn’t have been proud. Sorry, Bumble.

  CHAPTER 12

  HARIBO AND TANTRUMS

  Celebrity

  I have no problem with the Kardashians. You can’t really have a go at them. I’m just mystified by all the knobheads who follow them on social media, watch them on telly and buy their stuff, then slag them off on social media. They’re not much different to people who moan about footballers being paid tens of millions but who spend 60 quid on a ticket to watch them. If you’ve got a problem with how much they earn, boycott the matches.

  I’ve heard it said that celebrity adulation is like a religion. If that’s the case, Kim Kardashian must be like a modern-day Jesus to some people. I’m not bagging Jesus, but if he wasn’t actually the son of God, he was the greatest chancer in history, even bigger than Kim Kardashian. And it would make Jesus the forerunner of Snapchat and Instagram, centuries ahead of his time.

  Going in the jungle is the only thing I’ve ever done for no other reason than the money. But I’ve got no time for reality TV people and don’t really respect them. If my wife turned around and said she wanted to go on The Real Housewives of Cheshire, I’d think she wasn’t the woman I thought she was.

  I’m not going to sit here and judge the people on The Only Way is Essex or Geordie Shore, they’re just trying to make a few quid. It’s not for me, but if that’s how they want to portray themselves, fair play to them. There’s nothing wrong with stacking shelves in a supermarket, but if programme makers want to put these people on TV, make them famous and give them money, then I can see why people would want to do that instead. It’s society that’s the problem, not them.

  For a lot of kids, reality TV has become aspirational TV, which is so sad. They think they don’t have to do anything in life to be rewarded. I don’t watch Love Island, but a lot of people I know watch it. I’ll hear people complaining that the world is going to hell in a handcart, and in the next breath they’re telling me that they watch Love Island every night. Robbie Savage is addicted; every time I see him at the gym he says to me, ‘Did you watch Love Island last night?’ ‘No, Robbie, like I said yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that, I don’t watch Love Island…’ I just think, ‘Having sex on TV, just to be famous, is that where we are now?’

  I sometimes wonder who are the clever people and who are the idiots? On the one hand, you’ve got people who make millions by opening boxes on YouTube – ‘unboxing’, it’s called, and there might be a mobile phone or an Xbox or a toy inside – and on the other you’ve got people who make peanuts by spending months writing books that hardly anyone reads. The people who write books are meant to be the intelligent ones, but there’s the conundrum: is slaving over something that you’ll be paid very little for cleverer than making millions by pissing about on YouTube? If money is your only measure of success, then yes. Then there are the people who play computer games for a living. They earn millions, fill arenas, and they reckon it will be bigger than actual sport eventually. I’ve got nothing against the people doing it, they’ve just found a gap in the market, it’s the people watching it I don’t get.

  One of the things I try to get across to my kids is the importance of having a passion, pursuing it and being the best you can possibly be at whatever that passion might be. Nowadays, people want fame without being good at anything. So I also try to teach my kids that the most important things in life are the hardest to achieve. I’ve had things handed to me on a plate, and it’s given me no satisfaction, not one bit. When I did the musical, I’ve got no doubt people were saying, ‘Why is he doing a musical when he’s a former cricketer and can barely sing a note?’ But I tried my nuts off, worked so hard to do it to the best of my ability, and that’s what made it so worthwhile.

  I dipped my toe in the celebrity lifestyle when I was younger, did the rounds, went to the dos in spangly nightclubs, pretended to know people when actually I’d only seen them on TV. Looking back, it was all just a bit weird. I’d go into a room full of celebrities, and someone would approach me and not even bother introducing themselves. Or I�
��d say, ‘I’m Fred, nice to meet you’, and they’d say, ‘Nice to meet you again.’ And I’d be thinking, ‘But I’ve never met you before.’ I’ve been to gatherings where I’ve mixed people up, because I didn’t know who they were. I was in some bar in Mayfair, chatting to this fella, and I was calling him Theo all night and asking him about Arsenal, because I thought he was the footballer Theo Walcott. It was only when I was leaving that someone told me I’d actually been chatting to Marvin from JLS.

  Mind you, I have had a couple of moments when I’ve wanted to use that terrible line, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I was at Lord’s recently, where the kids were playing this indoor tournament. We were walking past the ground with all these other kids and their parents, they were all going on about how wonderful it looked, and I turned around and said, ‘I’ll give you a tour if you want?’ I walked up to the Grace Gates, looked in the hut and realised I didn’t know anyone. This woman said, ‘Have you got a pass?’

  ‘No, but I’m a life member.’

  ‘Have you got your book on you?’

  ‘No, I’ve not got me book…’

  All the time, I’m looking at her as if to say, ‘Come on, love, it’s me. You’re working at Lord’s, you must know who I am…’

  But she keeps saying, ‘You can’t go in if you’ve not got your pass!’

  All the kids and parents are milling about by the gates with excited looks on their faces and there is absolutely no way I can back out, so I say, ‘Look, truth be told, I actually used to play a bit for England. I was captain.’

  I start looking around for this massive picture of me with a quote next to it, but it’s been replaced with one of Andrew Strauss, so I resort to putting my name in Google and saying, ‘Look, that’s me!’

  ‘You can’t go in if you’ve not got your pass!’

  In the end, I ask her to get someone down who might know me, and when this woman turns up who recognises me, I feel like hugging her.