Harmison hits out at England top brass over rebuke of star players
Former England team-mates Stephen Harmison and Andrew Flintoff FORMER Durham and England bowler Steve Harmison has criticised the England management over the treatment of his former international team-mates Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen.
Harmison, who played 63 Tests and 58 one-day internationals for England, has spoken out against the way his colleagues were let down by the handling of certain situations by the hierarchy at the time.
At the 2007 World Cup in West Indies, Flintoff was one of six players fined for drinking late in a Rodney Bay nightclub just hours after England’s opening defeat to New Zealand and 48 hours before their victory over Canada.
Newspaper reports that he fell off a pedalo and got into difficulties in the water in the early hours of the morning forced then-England coach Duncan Fletcher to take action against the all-rounder. In his autobiography,
serialised in Harmison said: “I enjoyed playing for England under Duncan Fletcher because he got the best out of me.
“But I wasn’t playing for him, I was playing for my country – he was just the coach.
“A lot of it was about Andrew Flintoff’s drinking, wondering out loud what sort of state he would have been in without the responsibility of captaincy.
“A coach might not like his captain, but he has to back him. As Fred (Flintoff’s nickname) felt the pressure, it suited people in the England hierarchy for him to be seen as having lost all sense of responsibility. It suited the narrative that he wasn’t behaving in a manner suited to being England captain.
“It just got worse and worse for Fred, culminating in the pedalo incident in St Lucia during the 2007 World Cup, where he was vice-captain.
“The management decided they wanted to make a very public example of Fred by parading him in front of the media. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“There he was, Andrew Flintoff, the man who had done so much for the England team, and gone no small way to enhancing the reputation of the coaching staff, being hung out to dry.”
Pietersen was in a different situation three years later when caught up in a texting and Twitter row during England’s home summer series against South Africa.
England and Wales Cricket Board chief executive David Collier had said Pietersen was “provoked” into sending text messages which led to his exclusion from the England side by South African players.
Harmison wrote: “Kevin Pietersen did a lot of good things for English cricket and to sack him was disrespectful.
“Agreed, he said some stupid things, some nasty things. But there were things going on that were unprofessional.
“A fake Twitter account was set up to mock Kevin and, whether that was (Stuart) Broad, (Graeme) Swann or whoever, it was totally out of order.
“There’s no smoke without fire and for Kevin to have been that upset, there must have been some influence on that Twitter account coming from within.
“When the management joined in the victimisation, that’s what did for Kevin. To compile a dossier behind his back, as they did on the 2013-14 Ashes tour, was a disgrace.
“There was an agenda from the ECB hierarchy to embarrass him, to ridicule him, but that made the whole thing worse.”