For former England international Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, few things in life are as joyous as cricket. And his mission is to spread that joy.
In the first series, Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, the former England player created a cricket team out of a group of disadvantaged boys from his local town of Preston.
Now, he’s taking them to India with the aim of training them up in a country where “cricket is 10 times bigger than football.” The show follows him up until this point: announcing his plans to a room full of beaming boys – a group diminished to nine from the original squad of 20.
But of course, things don’t go smoothly. For mere weeks later, Flintoff was involved in a horrific car accident that almost killed him and led to months of surgery and recuperation.
The producers handle this sensitively – showing the boys’ stricken faces as the news is broken of Flintoff’s accident. “He was there for us, we've got to be with him while he's going through this,” one of them says.
It’s a sweet moment, and one that sets the tone for the rest of the episode very neatly. For once Flintoff is back on screen, he’s a changed man.
The confidence is gone; in its place is a man who’s more withdrawn and anxious. He has a massive scar on his face that multiple surgeries haven’t been able to erase. He admits he rarely leaves the house, that he suffers from panic attacks and says he’s been unable to “just shake it off.”
It’s heartbreaking stuff, but what is tear-jerkingly wholesome is seeing them all pull together in its aftermath. The boys in Flintoff’s squad are a motley bunch, whose talent in cricket is what he politely calls “mixed”; we meet Shaun, who’s having trouble keeping his job, and Adnan, the Afghani refugee who (partly thanks to Flintoff) was granted leave to remain in the country a few years ago and is now thriving.
Only two people in their group have passports. We see them packing their bags with dried noodles and porridge for the journey. One of the group, Josh, talks about his autism and how it affects his diet. And yet, when they arrive, Flintoff is sending them to the market to shop for dinner (a task they perform with plenty of enthusiasm if not skill) while he hunts down some local cricketeers to pit his team against.
There’s a big emphasis on healing in this first episode – both for Flintoff and the boys, for many of whom this is their first-ever trip abroad. “I’m probably more vulnerable than I ever have been in my life over the past 12 months,” Flintoff tells the camera at one point. “So I'm reaching out to cricket, I suppose, to help me.”
That it does: clearly, he is never more at ease than he is on the pitch, and a rather lovely sequence at the end of the first episode sees him play an impromptu match of ‘gully cricket’ – that is, a form of street cricket played by the kids.
It’s a testament to the power of sport, a promise of its healing power that we’ll doubtless see more of over the upcoming series. Viewers may have to keep the hankies handy though.
