On Her Majesty's Disservice: England's most controversial cricketers

Andrew Flintoff

Andrew Flintoff

Flintoff continued Botham’s legacy in a sense. The big all-rounder wore his heart on his sleeve throughout his international career and was perhaps one of those ‘bad boys’ who squandered a lot of potential as a consequence of their overtly jolly attitude. Flintoff grew into the trade of being bad. As a novice in 2002 when England toured India, his crime was a pardonable one as he ran bare-bodied in Mumbai after England had leveled the ODI series with one match to go. India’s Sourav Ganguly memorably returned the favour at Lords the next year, and this incident also prophesied the small affair that was to play out at the T-20 world cup in 2007.

Flintoff had just completed his over when he couldn’t contain the burst of his naughty emotions and decided to have a merry word with the Indian southpaw Yuvraj Singh. Yuvraj was too eager to take on such a battle in the way of his ancients, in a spontaneous Greco-Roman style wrestling match, but the constraints of an International game meant that he had to take out his frustrations on the baby-faced Stuart Broad by smashing him for 6 sixes in an over, with Andrew Flintoff, melting in embarassment, being reduced to a curious spectator on the boundary line.

That was, however, 2007. Andrew Flintoff had seen the lows and highs of his career by then. His magnum opus was in 2005 when he was able to channelize his extreme competitiveness and was, arguably, the single most exciting cricketer of the most keenly contested Ashes series in recent memory. Flintoff rioted the Aussies with the ball, dismissing Justin Langer and Rocky Ponting with two nasty deliveries in a single over at Edgbaston and continued to be menacing in the same manner throughout the series. He played aggressive counter-attacking cricket with the bat, and every single one of his celebrations embodied the sense of vindictiveness that the English had been harboring for over a decade. His quick-fire century at Trent Bridge was the high-point of his career that pushed England over the line. He celebrated to an extent that he was tipsy when interviewed at the Ashes parade.

Flintoff’s tragic-comic moment of epic quality came at the 2007 World Cup when the incarnation of the merry-making Bacchus was rescued from drowning off a pedalo after the first ODI against New Zealand at St. Lucia. The incident soon came to be known as ‘Fredalo’ with Michael Vaughan blaming it squarely as the reason for England’s failure at the tournament.

Douglas Jardine

The legacy of Douglas Jardine has been marred by a single-dimensional reading of a multi-faceted character, who was no scheming villain but a humane cricketer with a tough side. The ‘bodyline series’ of 1932-33 that contributes so much to the Ashes rivalry is deservedly infamous. Jardine captained England to a 4-1 win Down Under through a tactic of attacking the batsmen with pace and with an intention to hurt. The images of cracked skulls and broken backs are constantly ignited in the media, thus making the character of Jardine inaccessible to us. C.K. Nayudu’s observations on Jardine as a cricketer provide us with an alternative perspective. Nayudu stated in Jardine’s obituary, “…a tough fighter, a shrewd tactician whose knowledge of the game was very sound and profound.”