Meet the FLINTOFFS
Perfect pull shots, massive hands and milkshakes! Freddie’s teenage sons are chips off the old block …
Of all the shots, it is the signature pull stroke that most demands the double take: head dipping as the muscular frame swivels, weight transferring on to the back foot as the front one lifts slightly awkwardly from the turf.
It is an image from that iconic summer of 2005 projected through a new lens. Ball being belted through the Birmingham breeze and into the stands. Not on the television screens of a nation infatuated with the Ashes, but on the social media pop-ups of curious county cricket aficionados.
Andrew flintoff has attempted to mute the noise around his two cricketing sons, but the actions of Rocky, 16, at Edgbaston last week screamed for attention.
Playing alongside Corey for Lancashire’s Second XI, he marked just his third appearance with a maiden senior hundred against Warwickshire.
The candles on his most recent birthday cake had been blown out a matter of hours when he hit an unbeaten 50 off Durham’s attack the previous week.
Such distinctive movements brought back memories for Mail Sport’s David Lloyd among others.
‘All the mannerisms were exactly the same,’ says Lloyd. ‘He just looked the absolute spit of him. The way that he walks, the way that he runs between the wickets, you could see he was a flintoff straightaway.’
As Lancashire head coach, Lloyd watched flintoff senior intently at the same age in the mid-1990s and ventured to the family home in Preston to reason, over tea and biscuits, that future ambitions would be best met down the road at Old Trafford rather than with Northamptonshire, whose offer to uproot included a private school education.
‘Bumble’ later handed him a County Championship debut at 17 and, after a harrowing maiden first-class appearance involving almost as many dropped catches as runs, flintoff would say that he missed his first coach’s knowledgable influence as their paths headed in different directions.
‘freddie’ is now the one providing wise counsel, taking control of his sons’ early careers. So far, that has involved keeping the media at arm’s length, instructing Lancashire to rebuff requests for interviews and photographs to allow them to focus on playing.
It feels inevitable, however, that he will soon be scanning the terms of a couple of rookie professional contracts.
At Emirates Old Trafford, senior players acknowledge that the talent flintoff displayed in transcending the sport with his exploits against Australia 19 years ago has passed through the genes. ‘They’re good kids. Rocky is the one that’s got the headlines and rightly so, because he’s put a couple of scores together and he’s a solid player,’ said England fast bowler Saqib Mahmood, who has been captaining Lancashire’s second XI while managing his return from long-term injury. ‘In some ways, for batters it can be easier to make the step up in second-team cricket, because you go from batting on club wickets to some pretty flat ones at main county grounds and if you’ve got a good technique, as Rocky has, you can put together an innings. ‘Corey bats a bit as well, though, and they’re going to be proper cricketers.’ Indisputably, since the siblings debuted together in a Roses contest at Headingley earlier this month, in contrast to Rocky’s six-slamming innings of 50 off 68 against Durham and 116 off 168 at Warwickshire, Corey, two years his senior, has made more modest statements.
THAT, in part, is down to the fact that a stress fracture of the back he suffered last year restricts him to bowling four overs per innings.
But both are still coming to terms with their physicality and there are echoes of their father here: flintoff played as a specialist batter for a period in his late teens to avoid irrevocably damaging his back as boy became man.
‘Rocky’s hands make mine look like a child’s hands,’ Mahmood observes. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I first saw them.’
The brothers are also fuelled by an undiluted love of the sport. ‘Last week, we played at Old Trafford and when a game gets rain affected, I like to have a nap,’ says Mahmood.
‘So we had the entire team playing one hand, one bounce in the dressing room and me, the grandad of the group at the age of 27, lying on the physio bed fast asleep. I couldn’t believe how much energy they had.’
The generational gap was felt more widely in Birmingham when the senior pro, taxi-ing a posse of academy players including Rocky, stopped at a cafe and offered to shout coffee: ‘I’m used to people asking for flat whites or cappuccino, but they were like, “nah”. They ordered chocolate milkshakes.’
The flintoffs’ exploits on the cricket field with Manchester Grammar — alma mater of Michael Atherton, John Crawley and Mark Chilton, and where another ex-England player Mike Watkinson is head of sport — stretch back seven years to when Corey captained the Under-11s to three trophies, including the Lancashire Cup, inside a fortnight.
And it was through their journeys that flintoff, 46, re-engaged with cricket. firstly, moving them from the local club of Alderley Edge to St Annes, where he himself played as a youngster, then on to Southport in the Liverpool competition, now widely recognised as the best in the North West. Deeper involvement came in the most distressing of circumstances, during recovery from the shocking Top Gear accident in December 2022 that saw him hospitalised for five weeks, when watching his boys in regional tournaments led to him undertaking some informal scouting work for the ECB.
By the end of the summer, he was interacting with England players, having been invited to watch the Ashes alongside Rob Key, one of his closest friends during a career cut short at 31 due to a chronic knee injury.
At the start of this one, he is fully immersed in the game once more — a lack of coaching qualifications conveniently overlooked to hand him positions as an assistant to Matthew Mott in England’s attempts to retain the Twenty20 world title in West Indies and United States this June, and the main man with Northern Superchargers in the Hundred.
The name might open doors, but living with it can be a seismic struggle, and as Liam Botham found out in the 1990s, being the son of a superstar slayer of Australians is as much a curse as a blessing. When he took five wickets on his debut for Hampshire against Middlesex, including that of former England captain Mike Gatting, he appeared to have seconded his dad Ian’s script writer.
But after two more appearances, he switched to rugby, saying: ‘I can never win at cricket having this name. If I do well people will say I should do. If I do badly they would say I was only in the side because of whose son I am. I wish I could be called plain Liam Bloggs.’
Given the personality of their famous father, whatever happens from here, the flintoffs are unlikely to do plain.