The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Sport Saturday
Flintoff for England coach? Stupid not to consider it, says Key
England would be “stupid” not to consider Andrew Flintoff for the role of head coach when the job becomes vacant, according to Rob Key, the director of men’s cricket.
Key says Flintoff has a “gift” with people, comparing his man-management skills with Test side head coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes, and revealed that Flintoff would step up his coaching development by being part of England’s backroom team at June’s T20 World Cup in the Caribbean in his most significant assignment yet.
Flintoff is close friends with Key, who has been instrumental in paving his return to cricket after he suffered terrible facial injuries while filming an episode of Top Gear. In a short time, Flintoff has won over England players and will be a candidate for the white-ball coach’s role if it becomes available after the World Cup. Current head coach Matthew Mott is under pressure after a poor 50-over World Cup last year.
“Without question, I think he would be an excellent head coach,” Key said. “Who knows where he ends up in the future. He will be a worthy candidate going forward. When that time comes and whoever is in this job, and it might be outside of my time, they would be stupid not to look at him.”
Flintoff will be head coach of the Northern Superchargers in this summer’s Hundred and spent part of the winter working with England’s limited-overs team on a tour of the Caribbean and as a mentor with the under-19s and Lions teams.
He will also work with England in the home ODI series against Pakistan, which precedes the T20 World Cup – a tournament that will take him back to the scene of the infamous pedalo incident at the 2007 World Cup in St Lucia.
Flintoff had little direct involvement with cricket for years after his retirement as his television career took off. But he stayed in touch with Key, who reached out when Flintoff was at home recovering from his car-crash injuries and invited him to watch the Ashes Test matches last summer.
“I had a health issue myself a few years earlier and I knew from my experience with my stroke that the worst thing is sitting at home doing nothing,” Key said. “Your mind can’t stop thinking about what is going to happen and the best thing I ever did was go back to work. That was the only time I remember not thinking about what happened.
“I said to Fred, ‘Find an office at the ground and watch from there’. For all the things he has done, cricket is always the thing he goes back to. Like all of us, it is the thing we love. It is almost like he has no choice. It is what he thinks about the most after his family.”
Key added: “He has helped us immensely. Just having someone who knows what it is like to struggle and come out the other end is so relatable to those players. When they have had a bad day, he can explain it. He is one of those people, when he talks to you, he is working you out. He has high emotional intelligence so he understands when you need a bit of an arm around your shoulder or blunt honesty. Those are the skills that make a great leader. Leadership is about making the people around you feel better and he is someone who is like that. He has a lot to offer.
“Flintoff is a leader, like Stokes. He is not going to need to learn leadership qualities. He has those in abundance, which is what you need at the top level. He has that empathy that Stokes has, as well as being a great player. He knows what it is like to nick off and to struggle. All these things as a leader, your interactions with people, mean you can impact people in a positive or negative way with everything you do. Fred is aware of that, and not many are aware of that, and he understands how to use that gift with people.”
Key says one of his aims is to refresh the coaching education programme that would offer former top professionals such as Flintoff, Moeen Ali and Eoin Morgan a fast-track route with their playing experience counting towards recognised qualifications.
“It will be fascinating to see how he does with the Superchargers,” Key said. “If you could design the perfect head coach development programme, Flintoff is going on a brilliant journey. He started off as a mentor helping out, then a bit of Lions cricket, the under-19s and he is going to be a head coach of a team with a draft, working out how you assemble a squad and get them all playing together quickly. That is relevant experience, much more than sitting on a Zoom call listening to someone tell you what to do.
“Moeen Ali, I think, will be an excellent coach, there are so many people. They have these skills and we want to try to create experiences where they can really learn.”