Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams: Ultimate Test
he difference between a game and a sport, a back-page editor once told me, is down to tobacco. If you can smoke while you’re playing, it’s not a sport.
By that definition, darts and snooker contests might merit the term ‘match’ or ‘tournament’ but they’re not actual sports. Tennis and rugby, on the other hand, are best played without a Woodbine between your lips.
But where does that leave cricket? The greatest batsman in history, Dr W.G. Grace, famously enjoyed a pipe on the pitch. Yet it is indisputably a sport.
I suspect the real dividing line has nothing to do with smoking and everything to do with Britain’s ancient obsession with class. The posher the players, the more emphatically they are deemed sportsmen. And cricketers, at least in this country, are regarded as toffs.
Former England captain Freddie Flintoff, though many of his teammates were privately educated, is working class to the tips of his pads. He has tried doggedly to change cricket’s image in his Field Of Dreams series, inspiring a bunch of lads from his home town Preston to take up the sport.
But taking his crusade to Bootle, one of the poorest districts of Liverpool, in his Ultimate Test (BBC1), he discovered how deeply ingrained the perception still is. Meeting a group of teens who have all been excluded from school for bad behaviour, he asked, ‘What does everybody think of when I mention cricket?’
‘Gotta have money to play it,’ one boy snapped back.
That’s not true elsewhere in the world, as Freddie showed last year when he took a young team to India. In the slums of Kolkata, boys are devoted to a version called gully, played with a bundle of rags for a ball.
Former England captain Freddie Flintoff, though many of his teammates were privately educated, is working class to the tips of his pads
Charismatic Freddie might not be able to sweep away centuries of class prejudice but he stands a good chance of putting an all-girls team together
He has tried doggedly to change cricket’s image in his Field Of Dreams series, inspiring a bunch of lads from his home town Preston to take up the sport
In England, cricket is also seen as a predominantly male game. Charismatic Freddie might not be able to sweep away centuries of class prejudice but he stands a good chance of putting an all-girls team together.
At a youth club in Blackpool, he was the centre of attention, and a full squad of eager young female cricketers turned up to his first training session, even though most of them had never played before. ‘Come on, ladies,’ Freddie encouraged them, before correcting himself: ‘Ladies? Girls? I’m overthinking it.’
Surely, in Lancashire, they’re lasses. So far, we’ve seen less of them, perhaps because the boys from Bootle were acting up more. Their batting skills were slow to develop, but they caught on to the art of sledging immediately.
One 16-year-old named Ryan barracked the coaches gleefully. ‘I made a teacher quit in primary school,’ he bragged. ‘I wanna know if I’ve still got it.’
Then he turned on a teammate whose bowling was being smacked all over the field: ‘If you don’t get one out, you’re gonna be a virgin till you’re 40!’
If banter were an Olympic sport, Scousers would take all the medals.
