‘Talk about grassroots cricket,” says Freddie Flintoff, leaning on a rickety railing outside a dilapidated Liverpool sports club. “This is in t’soil, this.” After three years on air, Field of Dreams, the documentary where the former England captain trains teenagers from deprived areas to play a sport they have no previous interest in, has reset to zero. His original group of lads from Preston, Lancashire, have become a team (season one) that has toured India (season two). They returned as young men who love cricket but no longer need their friend Fred’s help.
For the series to continue, the format needs to start again. And it is now a format: all the emotions and challenges are familiar as Flintoff arrives in Bootle, Liverpool, another neglected area of deindustrialised north-west England. A representative of the local cricket club, once a thriving community hub that is now regularly vandalised, takes Flintoff on a tour of the neighbourhood’s derelict and boarded-up buildings, explaining that kids there commit petty crime and join gangs for a lack of anything else to do. When Flintoff visits a class of 16-year-old boys at a PRU – a pupil referral unit, ie a school for children who are unable or no longer welcome to attend mainstream schools – they have never heard of him and think cricket is a way for posh eccentrics to waste time.
