Freddie Flintoff’s Field Of Dreams On Tour (BBC1)
One of the great mysteries of English sport is why cricket games are halted at the first hint of a shower. Regular deluges are an inevitable feature of British life – why invent a game where rain stops play?
Football and rugby don’t stop for rain. Music festivals revel in rain, and turn into mudbaths. We queue in the rain, work in the rain, even picnic on the beach in the rain. What’s so special about cricket?
In Kolkata, as Freddie Flintoff’s ragtag team of novices discovered in his Field Of Dreams On Tour, cricket doesn’t stop for anything… not even the monsoon. Anything less than a lightning strike means they play on.
The Indian refusal to be deterred by any difficulties breeds exceptional resilience. Boys playing in the street with a plank of wood and a tennis ball displayed remarkable skill as well as a delight in the game.
That dauntless spirit shone through in other ways. At a school for orphans who might otherwise be living rough and begging for scraps, the children showed real eagerness to learn.
In Kolkata, as Freddie Flintoff’s ragtag team of novices discovered in his Field Of Dreams On Tour, cricket doesn’t stop for anything
The show sees Flintoff take a group of youngsters on a cricket tour to India
They sat upright at their desks, paying keen attention, and wrote in their exercise books with furious intensity.
One girl named Jasmine, barely in her teens, declared in faultless English her ambition to become ‘a famous criminal lawyer’.
Yet their living quarters were basic beyond belief – a row of painted wooden cots, apparently made from packing cases, and a cluster of toothbrushes beside the sink.
The contrast between this and documentaries about British comprehensive schools, such as C4’s Educating Yorkshire, could not be more stark.
It’s a mystery why pupils with no advantages can thrive while, half the world away, some children given everything they need to succeed will reject it all.
Some of Freddie’s lads saw this contradiction too, and were starting to wonder about it. Eli, the 18-year-old from Blackpool who was the last to join the squad, confessed to the ex-England star that he felt he’d wasted his education.
‘I’ve let opportunity slip through my fingers, and I don’t want that to happen again,’ he vowed.
He hated himself for his past mistakes, he said, but Freddie steered him towards a more upbeat attitude.
‘I wouldn’t look back and beat yourself up about mistakes,’ he said, ‘or feel you must make up for them. Just learn from them.’
The cricket legend said the children’s struggles in India makes his injuries ‘pale into insignificance’
A tearful Freddie Flintoff revealed how his team’s journey has put his own challenges into perspective
As a coach, he isn’t especially eloquent or charismatic, but his honesty and lack of pretension is making an impression on the boys who are willing to listen.
That’s the real purpose of this show, because it certainly isn’t about assembling a world-beating bunch of cricketers.
They did manage to defeat one team, hastily assembled from young men who were break-dancing and rapping in the park – but there was more than a suspicion that the locals were going easy on the visitors out of an exaggerated sense of hospitality.
‘I’m almost like a proud dad,’ Freddie announced. Take a win when you get one.
