Athers I stand and applaud you

[oitoitoi]

Andrew Flintoff comes up short in great debate - Times Online

This article will probably be pretty unpopular among England fans, it's objective and cold at a time in the series when people want romanticism. It's the ballsiest cricket article I've ever read by an English cricket writer, and I agree with every word of it. Thrilled to bits that he calls out Barnes over that post Lords article he wrote.

Thought I'd share it with the forum in case anyone missed it.

 

[Athlai]

 

[Jono]

Interesting read.

Much to like about Athers.

 

[BoyBrumby]

Big Del Pringle expressed similar sentiments in yesterday's
Torygraph.

Suggests Fred could've pushed himself harder:

"Not one driven to the pursuit of excellence, there is a large part of Flintoff that seems content to be good enough, which may be why he does not sit comfortably with the team's current management. "

& that he's thought of particularly fondly by us Poms because he saved his best for yer crims,

"Five Test hundreds and three five-wicket hauls in 78 Tests is decent but not devastatingly good. If he had a peak it came between 2003 and 2006, when in more than 41 Tests he averaged 40 with the bat and 27.9 with the ball.

Impressive though that was, it is not Ian Botham-esque, the all-rounder all subsequent pretenders have been compared to. In 102 Tests, Botham made 14 hundreds and took 27 five-wicket and four 10-wicket hauls, the majority of them match-turning efforts. Flintoff has contributed his own match-altering performances, but like Mike Gatting, who will forever dine out on his two victories as England captain because they won the Ashes, they have added cachet for mostly being against Australia."

---

It's not all football, rain, warm beer & overrating all-rounders up here you know.

 

[King Pietersen]

Excellent read that. As you said, it's going to be unpopular amongst quite a few English fans, but I agree with everything he's said in the article. Superb stuff.

 

[tooextracool]

Big Del Pringle expressed similar sentiments in yesterday's
Torygraph.

Suggests Fred could've pushed himself harder:

"Not one driven to the pursuit of excellence, there is a large part of Flintoff that seems content to be good enough, which may be why he does not sit comfortably with the team's current management. "

& that he's thought of particularly fondly by us Poms because he saved his best for yer crims,

"Five Test hundreds and three five-wicket hauls in 78 Tests is decent but not devastatingly good. If he had a peak it came between 2003 and 2006, when in more than 41 Tests he averaged 40 with the bat and 27.9 with the ball.

Impressive though that was, it is not Ian Botham-esque, the all-rounder all subsequent pretenders have been compared to. In 102 Tests, Botham made 14 hundreds and took 27 five-wicket and four 10-wicket hauls, the majority of them match-turning efforts. Flintoff has contributed his own match-altering performances, but like Mike Gatting, who will forever dine out on his two victories as England captain because they won the Ashes, they have added cachet for mostly being against Australia."

---

It's not all football, rain, warm beer & overrating all-rounders up here you know.

Have to agree with that, as a bowler there is very little that Flintoff has done to improve himself to the point where he's added nothing different to his artillery since 2004-05 (despite making a lot of progress with his seam position before that under Cooley). As a result, with all the injuries, he's regressed as a bowler since then.

 

[aussie]

Freddie is great no question. The only reason why Freddie hasn't didn't fully progress from his great performances is because of injury - which is why he is retiring now. Athers is being too picky about his performances post 05 Ashes.

 

[sledger]

For mine he can type whatever he wants, stats or no stats, I'm not saying all of what he has written there is wrong, but I think Freddie will remain a "great" to many an England fan, myself included, and rightly so.

 

[Dissector]

There is no question that Flintoff had a very slow start to his career so his career figures remain quite mediocre. However if you take his stats from 2004 onwards he averages 36 with the bat and 29 with the ball in 50 tests. Now remember that this was an era of generally flatter pitches and he had serious injury problems through this period so this is an extremely impressive performance. Aside from Pollock no one in recent years has come remotely close to these kind of figures. IMO there is no doubt that a fit Flintoff during the second half of his career was a great cricketer.

 

[Langeveldt]

I disagree that Flintoff is a "great", and agree with everything Athers has written, but I don't think it can be blamed on Flintoff that he has courted such obsession with England's cricket lovers.. I don't think he has wanted to be in the limelight as much as has been thrust upon him this summer, and I certainly don't ever think he wanted to be compared with Botham

 

[Richard]

For mine he can type whatever he wants, stats or no stats, I'm not saying all of what he has written there is wrong, but I think Freddie will remain a "great" to many an England fan, myself included, and rightly so.

He's a great player to have in your team, but he's certainly not up with the best cricketers to have played the game.

 

[grecian]

I thought it was a perfectly decent piece actually. Would slightly argue that he compares Flintoff's 2009 with Beefy's 1981, clearly it'll be 2005 that's compared to '81 in cricket history, BTW 2005 an infinitely better Oz team, IMHO.

Was Simon Barnes article the entire reason you put him as "someone who shouldn't be allowed to write about cricket", Oitoitoi. Your obsession about Freddy seems to be much more pronounced then the fanboys, if you don't mind me saying

 

[Richard]

Andrew Flintoff comes up short in great debate - Times Online

This article will probably be pretty unpopular among England fans, it's objective and cold at a time in the series when people want romanticism. It's the ballsiest cricket article I've ever read by an English cricket writer, and I agree with every word of it. Thrilled to bits that he calls out Barnes over that post Lords article he wrote.

Thought I'd share it with the forum in case anyone missed it.

Certainly a very interesting and relatively unusual article, and one that's hard to disagree with much of (I'm never much of a fan of anything that dwells too much on "greatness", which is a term involving the wost-possible-combo of vague and sacred, but aside from that it's first-rate). Most unusual to have articles being written effectively as a reply to another article in the same paper.

Think he sums-up Flintoff about as well as you could wish to really. An excellent player who possibly could have been better but in the end was happy to be what he was - excellent, warmly received by the masses, inspirational, and someone who enjoyed playing cricket.

 

[four_or_six]

I'm a huge fan of Flintoff and at the same time I think it's a fair article, well written and well thought out, as you always get with Atherton. And many of the points he makes I think other people have been making in the last week, Vaughan's article was also interesting.

 

[Pratters]

Link to Vaughan's piece? Some one linked it some where but I lost it.

Any way, Atherton is a top journalist.

Greatness is a word I use preciously and I won't use it for Flintoff. Flintoff was capable of super human feats but those super human feats didn't come as many times in his career as I would want to categorise him as a great. He played his game with this heart on the sleeve though which I will always admire.

 

[pup11]

Link to Vaughan's piece? Some one linked it some where but I lost it.

Any way, Atherton is a top journalist.

Greatness is a word I use preciously and I won't use it for Flintoff. Flintoff was capable of super human feats but those super human feats didn't come as many times in his career as I would want to categorise him as a great. He played his game with this heart on the sleeve though which I will always admire.

Yeah, gotta agree with all of what both Vaughan and Athers have said, and its a shame really, because I don't think there would be any genuine cricket lover who don't like Freddie.

I don't think there is any problem is agreeing that Freddie had great potential, but when you look at his final tally, then you have gotta say he has under-achieved massively, people might say all the injuries he suffered through the course of his career didn't help, but one can say it might be due to this unprofessional attitude of his that he got injured so many times.

There is no doubt that when he has been fit, he always pushed his body to its limits for his country, but I don't think he was working as hard on his fitness off the field, had he done that the sky would have been the limit.

 

[Top_Cat]

Yup, Flintoff not a great of the game for mine. Had some great moments but they were few and far between. Blaming injuries is a cop-out.

 

[aussie]

Yup, Flintoff not a great of the game for mine. Had some great moments but they were few and far between. Blaming injuries is a cop-out.

Nah injuries is the reason he didn't become a great after he peaked in Ashes 05. His batting never really got a chance to really become a true test match # 6 . Plus although his bowling generally would come right away after he returned form a injury - injuries again prevented him from become even better - a big reason why he didn't take more 5 wicket hauls.

 

[Top_Cat]

Nah injuries is the reason he didn't become a great after he peaked in Ashes 05. His batting never really got a chance to really become a true test match # 6 . Plus although his bowling generally would come right away after he returned form a injury - injuries again prevented him from become even better - a big reason why he didn't take more 5 wicket hauls.

Don't buy it.

 

[tooextracool]

He didn't become a great because he just didn't put in the f'ing effort. Sorry but his attitude to the game was unprofessional. He played with all his heart on the pitch but he never ever worked truly hard enough on his game in the nets and outside of the actual match and thats the exact point. As I mentioned on here before, pointing at and praising Otis Gibson for his banal suggestion of 'pitch the bloody thing up' as though he just gave him the sort of advice that completely transformed him was a joke and a half and one you'd expect from someone with far less than 75 odd tests.

Yes he was injured, but during that downtime, did he ever think about how he could improve his bowling? Did he work out ways to bowl a slower ball? Did he work on getting reverse or conventional swing (we know at times he could do both, but he never got it going consistently for a reason)? I've stated plenty of times that I do believe his batting was hurt immensely because of injuries, lets face it the only way to score runs is to practice, practice and practice and he was constantly injured and unable to get enough batting time. As a bowler though, he just didn't care enough.