SPORT TALK
Alas, lockdown wasn’t all sitting around the house in my pants. Sometimes, it was sitting around in my house in my pants broadcasting to the nation.
talkSPORT had just had a bit of a shake-up, with Laura Woods taking over the breakfast show from Alan Brazil Monday to Wednesday, and they wanted to keep things light. Instead of chatting about newsy stuff, me, Laura and Ally McCoist mostly just had a bit of a laugh. I found that a bit weird at first, because I kept thinking we should have been mentioning coronavirus and the chaos it was causing, at least every now and again. But I soon realised that we were supposed to be a little chink in the clouds for four hours every morning. If people wanted grimness – lots of different people discussing the coronavirus casualty figures, the lack of PPE in hospitals, when the whole madness might finally come to an end – there were plenty of other channels doing that, including our sister station talkRADIO. We touched on it every now and again, because it would have been weird not to, but me spouting about very important things I didn’t really know about wouldn’t have been wise, it would have been downright dangerous.
It’s strange how these opportunities arise. I’d done a bit of radio before, including a live show on BBC Radio 5 Live, which involved me interviewing various famous sportspeople (some of whom I’d never heard of), and enjoyed it. But there’s no way I would have been able to do a breakfast radio show in normal times because of my other commitments and the idea of getting up at 3.30 a.m. and driving to a studio fills me with dread. You can make it sound good on paper, because the show finishes at 10 a.m. But I’d just be knackered for the rest of the day and not be able to do anything. And I’d be lying in bed every night, panicking about having to get up in a few hours and worrying about not getting enough sleep. But during lockdown, I was able to roll out of bed at 5.30 a.m., shuffle into my living room, turn on my laptop and I was ready to go. To be honest, had I not been on camera, I could have set my alarm for 5.55 and done it from my bed. I’m always trying to come up with projects that don’t take me away from family (I haven’t been successful at it so far) so it was perfect.
I made it quite clear to the people at talkSPORT that I wasn’t a football aficionado, although I have started getting more into football recently, because of the kids. They watch anything: the Premier League, the Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga. I’ll watch Match of the Day and think, ‘Where have I been all these years, this is amazing. And when did Alan Shearer stop being miserable and become so charming?’
I play a bit as well, with some mates over at Man City’s indoor academy, and absolutely love it. I’m not Virgil van Dijk, but I can play to a half-decent standard. But I still don’t really know what’s going on. Luckily, my fellow centre-back is better than me, so I say to him, ‘Do me a favour, tell me where to go and what to do and I’ll be fine. Just don’t leave me to my own devices, or we could be down five–nil by half-time.’
When I was a kid, I played a couple of games for Preston Boys and got scouted by Blackburn, I think. But I never turned up for the trial, because I knew I wasn’t very good. I was just big, quite fast and someone who would get stuck in, which isn’t enough to make it as a professional footballer. When I played cricket, I could read a game. I could see how everything was going to pan out, like when I was playing chess. But I had no football intelligence. I’d stand at the back and think, ‘Where should I go? Who should I mark? What should I do if the ball comes to me?’ It would baffle me; I wouldn’t have a clue. So when Gary Lineker, Ian Wright and Shearer are breaking a game down, with all the graphics and arrows and what not, that’s like magic to me.
On talkSPORT, Ally had the football covered anyway, and it was a chance to focus a bit more on other sports that don’t always get a look in. Obviously, there wasn’t much live sport to talk about, which made it a bit tricky at times. And while I spoke to the bosses about what they wanted from me, I didn’t really get any guidance. There were periods when the only ‘sport’ was stories about furloughing. Hands up who knew that word before lockdown? Luckily, Laura, who has been presenting on Sky for years, is a consummate broadcaster and Ally is also brilliant and such a nice man. The best thing about Ally is that he is a great talker, to the extent that I was quite taken aback by it on my first day. As I soon worked out, it meant that it was my job to fill in the gaps. Saying we just winged it makes it sound unprofessional, but that’s basically what we did: Laura played the passes, Ally ran with the ball and I tried to finish things off.
People ask me if it’s terrifying, presenting a live radio show for four hours. It is a bit scary, but there are lots of adverts. After 13 minutes, I could pad downstairs in my slippers and get a brew. But it was more weird than scary, knowing that I was sitting on my own in my house and millions of people were listening. Instead of finding it stressful, it was more a case of being careful not to let my guard down, because I was sitting in my living room in my T-shirt. When I started doing it, I’d been living in a bubble for a few weeks, only really speaking to my family and close friends. So even having a conversation with Laura and Ally seemed bizarre. I could see them on my Zoom, but there was a slight delay and it made it more difficult to read people, bounce off them and anticipate what was coming next. At times, it was almost like flying blind.
Before my first show, I made the mistake of going on Twitter. While most people were nice, there was a lot of negativity, mostly along the lines of, ‘Fucking hell, what have talkSPORT got that dickhead Flintoff on for?’ Jeez, people are ruthless on there. I found myself thinking, ‘All right mate, it’s only sport.’ But to some people, sport is the most serious thing in the world, even during a global pandemic. If a nuclear bomb landed on London, you’d be able to hear voices coming from underneath the radioactive dust: ‘This is bad and all that, but I hope this doesn’t mean Spurs are going to delay sacking Mourinho . . . ’
I quickly worked out that presenting a sports show is very different to presenting an entertainment show, because everyone seems to have an opinion about sport, in the same way as everyone had an opinion on how to beat coronavirus, and some people get very angry if you’ve got a different opinion to them. Because I’ve never played professional football, some people thought I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion on it, or indeed anything else. And even if I had the same opinion as them, they sometimes got upset because I didn’t put the opinion across in the right way: ‘Stop. Doing. Sport. Wrong!’
Most people knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, given the unusual conditions. But others had absolutely no problem letting me know that they didn’t like me, in a way that I’ve never experienced when presenting various TV shows. I suppose that made sense, because talkSPORT is essentially a station for football fans. Then there were the people upset that we weren’t talking about sport enough. I couldn’t get my head around that. There was genuinely no sport, we weren’t making it up. Did they want us to pretend there was sport going on? I’m not going to lie to you, the strength of the criticism surprised me, I was getting called all sorts at 7.30 in the morning.
While I’ve never really got that tribal football-fan mentality, where people are absolutely vicious in their criticism, it did demonstrate how much people need sport in their lives and how upset they were to be without it. Sport is escapism, a release, gives people something to talk about and their lives meaning. Before lockdown, I would never have thought of myself as a sports fanatic, so I was surprised that I missed it so much. I just took it for granted that I could turn the TV on at any given moment and there would be some sport on, whether it was some cricket during the day, football on Wednesday evening or boxing on Saturday night. During lockdown, I’d find myself sticking the TV on, in the vain hope that some people somewhere on the planet were defying coronavirus and having a game of rugby or tennis. But, of course, there was nothing there, and I struggle watching old footage. It’s not the same as watching the same film twice, because knowing the final score means that most of the drama is lost.
Lockdown even made me reassess the importance or otherwise of my sporting career, and I’m about to contradict myself completely (I’m allowed to do that, because it’s my book). I’m often quite dismissive about my time as a cricketer, because it always struck me as a pointless trade that didn’t really help anyone. But when sport suddenly disappeared, it made me realise that sport does affect people’s lives, in that it makes people happy or sad or angry or frustrated or inspired. Maybe I did enhance people’s lives a little bit. It’s certainly true that I missed my kids playing sport, because I get so much satisfaction from watching them enjoy and do it well, whether it’s football or cricket or anything else. I guess lockdown proved the old adage that you only realise how much you love something when it’s taken away. It also showed that it’s okay to admit to missing unessential things, even during times of global crisis. I’m sure people missed lots of trivial things during the Second World War, even while other people were being killed all around them. That’s just basic human nature.
About the only sport that soldiered on during lockdown was darts, although the players had to play a ‘home tour’ in their garages and former world champion Gary Anderson had to pull out because his WiFi signal wasn’t strong enough. Let’s be honest: Gary probably just couldn’t be arsed, like most of the rest of us during lockdown.
Taking over from Alan Brazil, who had presented the show for the previous 20 years, was harder than taking over from Clarkson on Top Gear. I suppose some people just don’t like change, but the figures suggested there were still plenty of people getting up at 6 a.m. to listen to it, so they can’t have been that upset. And as far as I was concerned, at least it was getting me out of bed, breaking up the monotony and giving me a bit of routine, which I’d missed. When you’re being told what to do all the time, like when I was playing cricket, you rebel a bit. But when it’s gone, you realise how important it is.
When subjects came up that I wasn’t bothered about, or guests were on who I didn’t really know, it was a bit harder. Everyone was suddenly up in arms about what footballers got paid and I’d be thinking, ‘Have they only just realised?’ And sometimes I’d find myself discussing sportspeople I knew hardly anything about at 6.15, like when Arsenal’s Mezut Özil refused to take a pay cut (apparently he gives a lot of money to charity – when you’re a radio presenter, you quickly learn that some stories are a lot more complicated than you originally think).
As I’ve already mentioned, furloughing was a hot topic during lockdown. You had Premier League clubs mothballing non-playing staff and asking the government to pay some of their wages, which obviously didn’t go down well with fans, because their players were still getting hundreds of thousands of pounds a week. Then you had county cricket clubs furloughing staff, which was a different situation entirely, because some of those clubs were right on the brink. Even Lancashire were struggling, not only because of the lack of cricket but also because of the lack of income from the hotel and conference room. As for the grassroots clubs, lots of them were in dire straits. And with the best will in the world, there’s not much Lancashire could do for them. Me sending them a message of solidarity and singing ‘Imagine’ from my house in Altrincham wasn’t really going to be much help, let’s be honest.
Another lockdown staple turned out to be footballers ignoring government guidelines, like Aston Villa’s Jack Grealish and Manchester City’s Kyle Walker. Kyle allegedly had a party at his house. There couldn’t have been much social distancing going on that night. I don’t know what goes through people’s heads. I mean, it’s one thing having a couple of mates round for a few glasses of wine in your garden, another thing entirely filling your house up with ladies. But at least he gave us something to talk about for a few minutes. And to be honest, I felt more let down by joggers than footballers having sex parties. I was out one day with my missus and our new baby and these people kept running past, panting all over us and spraying us with sweat. I actually got quite angry about that. One of them ran straight through the middle of us, so I told him, in no uncertain terms, to behave himself. And when someone on a bike came too close, I stuck my arm out and let him have it as well. I wasn’t too worried about us, but there was an old couple down the road who looked absolutely petrified. They were almost cowering, as if they’d spotted the Grim Reaper.
Then there was the story about the potential takeover of Newcastle by Saudi Arabia. I didn’t know much about it, but I soon understood that Newcastle fans didn’t like Mike Ashley, because he sells cheap sports gear but hasn’t got enough money for their liking (even though they’re quite happy to buy half-price trainers from his shops), but they seemed quite happy for their club to be owned by Saudi Arabia. Then you had the other fans who had been wanting him to sell the club for years but were having a go at him for selling to Saudi Arabia. Whatever the subject, I soon realised that once I’d taken a position on it, I had to remember what that was, because we’d keep coming back to the same story throughout the show. When you’ve only just woken up, four hours can seem like an eternity. But if my position had been different at the end of the show than it was at the start, that would have given the game away.
Because there were so many people struggling financially during lockdown, there was a lot of talk about the immorality of football. Should footballers be earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a week? Probably not. But if someone had offered to pay me two hundred grand a week to play cricket, I would have bitten their arm off. That’s why it doesn’t really make sense to give footballers grief. At least they’re providing entertainment, unlike some people who work in the City, who are just moving money around and earning millions of pounds a year for doing it. And it’s only immoral because society is structured in such a way that people who do important jobs don’t earn anywhere near enough. That’s not the fault of footballers, especially as plenty of them give a lot of their money away. And look at Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, who raised millions to provide free food for underprivileged kids and forced the government to change their policy.
One of the problems when it comes to talking about morals is that everyone’s morals are different. Is what I earn for A League of Their Own or Top Gear immoral? (No, I’m not telling you how much I make.) Who decides? What is the cut-off point? The only way footballers’ wages will come down is if people stop watching them play. But that’s not happening, which presumably means hardly anyone objects on moral grounds. You could sell out Anfield and Old Trafford twice over for some games. But Premier League football isn’t all fan-funded anyway, most of the big clubs are owned by ludicrously wealthy foreign businessmen. Manchester City are owned by an entire foreign state. So it wouldn’t really matter to them if they had 40,000 people or one man and a dog watching their games. Fan boycotts would have more of an impact in the lower leagues, but those players don’t earn as much anyway.
Of course, the morality of big money in sport isn’t just a Premier League thing. I’ve seen stats that say cricket’s Indian Premier League (IPL) is the richest competition in the world, in terms of what players earn per game. Someone like Virat Kohli is earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per game, while tens of millions of his countrymen are living in the kind of poverty most British people couldn’t even imagine. But I played in the IPL and I don’t remember my agent asking for less money because it all felt a bit immoral.
I actually think fans are more likely to turn their back on the Premier League because of the lack of competitiveness, rather than perceived immorality. Because the top five or six clubs have so much more money than everyone else, and the gap seems to be getting wider, it’s all become very predictable. And if a competition is predictable, people are likely to stop watching, in the same way they’ll stop watching a TV series that’s been running for years and become repetitive. Americans understand that, which is why they have a draft system to at least try to give everyone a chance.
Yes, Liverpool won the title in 2020 for the first time in 30 years. But it was hardly a surprise, given how much money they spent on transfers and wages. And something’s not right when only two or three teams are capable of winning the league at the start of the season (I know Leicester won it in 2015–16, but something like that will probably never happen again). If 17 or 18 teams in a 20-team league know they can’t win it, it’s difficult not to conclude that it’s all a bit pointless. There was a time when the also-rans would maybe nick a cup here and there to keep the fans happy, but even that doesn’t happen much anymore. Clubs like West Ham or Newcastle have absolutely zero chance of winning the Premier League and almost no chance of winning a cup. So if you’re a fan, what have you got to look forward to each season? An outside chance of a seventh-place finish? Not getting relegated? It must be depressing. But people still go, week after week, year after year, knowing they’ve got no chance of doing anything. It’s a strange phenomenon.
More and more, the Premier League resembles Formula 1. They’re both incredibly slick products but they’re not very exciting. Although I have an appreciation for Lewis Hamilton. And the really mad thing is that the Premier League is actually quite unpredictable compared to other European leagues. In Scotland, Celtic have won nine league titles in a row. No club apart from them and Rangers has won the league since 1985. In Italy, Juventus have also won nine in a row. In Germany, Bayern Munich have won eight in a row. In France, Paris Saint-Germain have won seven of the last eight. In Spain, only two teams apart from Real Madrid and Barcelona have won the league in the twenty-first century. In Holland, only two teams apart from Ajax and PSV Eindhoven have won the league in the twenty-first century. It’s all a bit daft.
I actually think it’s a lot more enjoyable supporting a team in the lower leagues, because you never know what you’re going to get from season to season. Your team might end up in relegation scrap, a promotion fight or be yo-yoing between the top and the bottom of the league all season. They might surprise you and go on a cup run. Supporting a sports team should be about experiencing the full range of emotions. Not sitting in the middle of the Premier League season after season, because you don’t have quite as much money as the teams in the top six or seven. Or qualifying for Europe season after season, simply because your team is richer than most of the other teams.
Your team getting relegated might sting a bit, but at least it’s character building. And when your team is battling to stay up all season and manages to avoid the drop on the final day, the elation is like winning the World Cup. On top of that, players are often fighting for their futures in the lower leagues, which adds another layer of jeopardy. If their team gets relegated, will they be offloaded? Will they end up at an even smaller club in an even lower league? Will they suddenly be on 50 per cent less money? Will they end up on the scrapheap? They’re not as talented as the boys in the Premier League, but success and failure means every bit as much to them. Sure, watching Liverpool fizz the ball about and run rings around opponents is wonderful. But watching 22 players scrap for their lives in a League Two six-pointer has its own special appeal.
When I was a kid, I watched Preston quite a bit, when they were playing in the old Division Three. And recently, I started watching them again and have really enjoyed it. Don’t get me wrong, I like watching Manchester City in the Premier League. They look after you so well, especially if you’re in their Tunnel Club. That means getting to watch the players walk through a glass tunnel on their way to the pitch (which is a bit weird), eating beautiful food and watching the game from a big heated seat. But that’s when the problem starts for me. Because the fans just expect their team to massacre the opposition, the atmosphere can be quite sterile when they’re not.
Meanwhile, at Preston, you get a real sense of what it all means to the fans. They don’t expect their team to win every week or to play well, but it’s not about that. They desperately want them to succeed, but it’s more about supporting them because it’s their local team and the right thing to do. It’s about the belonging and the community and the realisation that the team’s success or failure will have a knock-on effect for the city as a whole, and I love it.
The tribal nature of football isn’t always a good thing, but it can be. I feel the pride when I watch Preston. I desperately want them to do well and I can feel that everyone else does as well. I look around and see the same people sat in the same seats they’ve been sat in for years, through thick and mainly thin. You certainly won’t find many Preston fans at Deepdale who aren’t from the city. And while the quality isn’t as good as it is at City, it’s drama in the true sense, because you never know what’s going to happen. Not long ago, I went to watch Preston at Deepdale and in the first half they played like Brazil. In the second half, they played like 11 blokes who had never seen a football before. God knows what the manager said to them at half-time, but it was one of the most bizarre transformations I’ve ever seen.
But even that’s got to be more meaningful that watching City beating someone 5–0 and wondering why my heated seat isn’t working. At the Etihad, I’ve seen people complain about their heated seat not being hot enough. When City were playing at Maine Road, before their move to the Etihad, a fan would buy a cup of Bovril if they were feeling a bit chilly. And I’ll look around and see that some people aren’t even watching. They’ll be taking pictures of their food or themselves and presumably sticking them up on Instagram. In contrast, at another Preston game I went to there was a woman handing out ginger biscuits she’d baked. She took the lid off this Tupperware box and people were passing this box around. That’s the nice side of tribalism in football. Mind you, she ran down the front and gobbed at the referee at half-time. Not really . . .
I don’t know if sport ceases to be sport if it becomes predictable, but it certainly becomes more boring. The dictionary definition of sport includes the word ‘compete’, so the less competitive something is, the less it can claim to be sport. That’s why international sport is often more compelling than club sport, because money is usually less of a deciding factor. One of the charms of watching England play sport, whether it’s football, cricket or rugby union, is the unpredictability. In the last few years, we’ve seen the England football team get knocked out of the European Championships by Iceland and reach the semi-finals of the World Cup. One year, the England cricket team is beating Australia in the Ashes, the next they’re losing to Holland in a World Cup. That makes being an England sports fan fun. And it mirrors my cricket career: on any given day I could score a load of runs, take a load of wickets or completely embarrass myself. And while English fans might grumble about their teams’ failures, they secretly love it. We’re not like Americans, who aren’t interested in anything they’re not good at. We like ups and downs, it reflects our national character and standing in the world. And we like having a moan.
With Laura in charge on talkSPORT, we were never short of things to discuss. And instead of constantly arguing about the latest VAR controversy, which is what most football chat seems to consist of nowadays, we were able to get to know guests properly. And when I wanted to mix things up a bit, I’d chuck in some conspiracy theory chat. When that happened, suddenly everyone had an opinion and there were even newspaper headlines about me thinking the earth was shaped like a turnip and that Elvis was still alive. I’d seen a picture in one of the newspapers of a gardener at Graceland, who was the spit of Elvis, or as he might look now. But what people don’t realise is that I’m saying this stuff for my own amusement. I don’t really think Elvis is alive, I just said that I hoped he was alive. Just as I didn’t really think the Loch Ness Monster might have come out of hiding during lockdown because of the lack of human activity. It was a joke!
Presenting a radio show like that is a real skill, because you can’t really sit on the fence. If there’s an argument going on about something that doesn’t really interest me, I’ll usually just stay out of it. I’m not the sort of person who says things for the sake of it, which makes me quite unusual nowadays, because everyone seems to think that you should have an opinion on everything, whether you know anything about it or not. If I didn’t feel strongly about something, I’d try to relate it to something similar I’d been through during my career as a cricketer. That said, that’s quite difficult to do when you’re discussing footballers on three hundred grand a week potentially taking a pay cut, because it’s not something I have any experience of. And if a subject came up that did interest me, I sometimes had to rein myself in a bit, because in the real world, away from the microphone, I don’t always express myself in the most articulate way. And you can’t really be effing and blinding on the radio at seven o’clock in the morning while people are eating their cereal.
I’ve always had a huge amount of respect for live broadcasters, people like Richard Bacon, who’s presented shows on lots of different stations, and 5 Live’s Nihal Arthanayake. And Alan Brazil is brilliant. The whole time he’s been doing that show (he now does Thursdays and Fridays), he’s never once sounded like he didn’t want to be there. Like the best radio presenters, he seems interested in every word a guest says, can flit from subject to subject and comes across as knowledgeable about pretty much everything, which he can’t possibly be. That’s a real skill, natural or not. Ally McCoist is similar, in that he has that ability to natter away about anything, as if you’re sitting in a pub with a pint. But he’s been broadcasting for years now, what with A Question of Sport and his own chat show up in Scotland.
What I find with former sportspeople of an older vintage is that they just have so many great stories and tell them incredibly well. They don’t talk a lot because they like the sound of their own voice, they just really enjoy entertaining people and making them laugh. That’s why their stories get better every time they tell them. I’d even go as far as to say that older sportspeople are simply more interesting, probably because sport was more interesting when they were playing. Sport is so professional nowadays that youngsters don’t really do much other than train and play, whereas the likes of Ally and Alan Brazil had a lot of fun away from the football pitch. Alan could write an entire book about horse racing, his love of wine and whatever else, while Ally even did a movie with Robert Duvall and Michael Keaton, called A Shot at Glory. It wasn’t as if Ally just had a walk-on part, he was a headliner. I went on A Question of Sport when I was 20 and was in awe of him.
It’s always weird when you see famous people pop up in places they’re not ‘supposed’ to be. I was watching the Rocky film Creed in a cinema in Australia when the British boxer Tony Bellew suddenly appeared on the screen. I literally did a double take and wanted to shout, ‘That’s Tony Bellew! That’s Tony Bellew!’ Not that anyone in Australia would have known who Tony Bellew was, but I was just so excited.
As I’m sure Tony would tell you, when you become famous for one thing and start doing something completely different, the public sometimes find it difficult to deal with. They just struggle to compute it. Tony had this reputation as a mouthy, lairy boxer, but he’s been on A League of Their Own a few times and is brilliant, probably the best guest we’ve ever had. He’s game for a laugh, hams things up and is actually a bit of a softie under the hard exterior. But because he was a boxer, and people have certain preconceptions about boxers, I think he’s struggling to carve out an identity for himself beyond the ring. And if he does manage to, people will start to think he’s two different people, just as they do with me.
There are honestly people out there who think Andrew Flintoff and Freddie Flintoff aren’t the same person. But it doesn’t bother me that people didn’t know I played cricket. Let’s face it, more people aren’t into cricket than are. In fact, I’d say it’s a good thing, because it suggests I’ve made a success of my second career. The same goes for someone like Alan Brazil, who was actually a very good footballer and played for Scotland in a World Cup, but lots of people know him only as a broadcaster. People not knowing he was an elite footballer is probably the best compliment he can receive. And Andrew Castle, the former tennis player, is a prime example of someone whose broadcasting career has been far more successful than his sporting one. But people aren’t always accepting of ex-sports-people trying to switch to another career. They’ll see me pop up where I’m not ‘supposed’ to and think, ‘Why is he on my TV?’
My mate Tom Davis was a scaffolder before he became a comedy writer and actor, and the comedian Romesh Ranganathan was a maths teacher. The fact they had ‘normal’ lives before becoming famous is seen as a good thing. But when an ex-sportsperson tries to have a crack at something else, people say, ‘What the hell does he know? He should stick to cricket.’ I had it with Top Gear: ‘What does Flintoff know about cars?’ But how does the fact that I once played cricket for a living have any influence on how well I can present a programme about cars? It makes no sense. People need to chill out a bit, instead of wanting people to stay in their box. In the ‘real’ world, people change careers all the time. And if ex-cricketer Imran Khan can be prime minister of Pakistan, then I can chat about a new car for a few minutes.