Cricket: Maturity of the beguiling natural

FREDDIE FLINTOFF is a mountainous man with bright, rosy cheeks which are usually swathed in a big, boyish smile. He wields a bat with immense, instinctive power, which usually enhances both the ruddiness and the smile.

He goes about his bowling with a similar, sleeves rolled-up gusto, though he is sometimes to be seen thrusting his hands on his hips, innocently flabbergasted with something or other. In the village team of the storybooks he would be the blacksmith, bashing the opposition for six, splintering their stumps and in between times laughing raucously with his chums.

But Flintoff, Andrew by birth and presumably still to his mum but now Freddie to almost everyone else, is not a part-time clogger from the forge, he is a Test all-rounder. An apprentice in the art perhaps, but with three caps behind him and the promise of an extended run. All of England should hope that he has the right stuff. Lord knows, Lord's know, England need a competitive team. A winning one would be a handy ancillary.

But they also need entertaining performers, men who will empty bars and then fill them again later on, who embrace the game instead of living in fear of it, who persuade you to watch by their very presence.

Flintoff, all 17 stones of him with plenty more where that comes from if he doesn't watch it, looks as if he might muster the credentials to do it. His two innings in the First Test at the Wanderers bespoke a batsman who was unbothered by chaos around him, maybe one who would not recognise the state.

Scores of 38 and 36 do not win Test matches - or not often - but those contributions from the Lancastrian shone like De Beers diamonds perched on a muddy Kop.

The way in which they ended was too limp, an edge away from the body and a mis-timed, leading edge thump to become the only spinning victim of the match. But Flintoff was fearless while he was in, and that alone is a virtue England will require in the long weeks ahead and in the years beyond them.

He is 22 tomorrow, young enough still to be learning, old enough to start delivering shortly. "I've got to learn to be more consistent and put a run together," he said. "I've really only played two seasons but last summer I'd get a hundred then go five or six matches without doing anything, then get some runs again. That's what I've got to stop."

This is an admirable ambition, but the nature of his game suggests, and thankfully so, he will never fulfil it entirely. He hits the ball, any ball, with tremendous force, not always calculating the likely consequences, forgetting the tenets of the coaching manual in his execution.

"I realise that there's a lot of expectations on every young player who comes through to the England side," he said. "It happened to Ben Hollioake and Alex Tudor and me. But I don't let any of that bother me. I never read the papers or what's said about me." This, it transpired, was not the whole truth. He is an avid reader of The Sun but gets no further than the "Dear Deidre" agony column. "It's just a laugh, which appeals to me."

Before this trip started, Flintoff was in what were politely called contractual negotiations with Lancashire. For a while it seemed they would not pay what he (or his agent) wanted. He denies there was any wrangling, stressing that there is a pay ceiling at Old Trafford, adding that he loves playing for Lancashire, insisting he would not want to play anywhere else, and convincing you of it all to boot.

Flintoff is as uncomplicated a bloke as he is a cricketer, friendly, open, straightforward. His brother is an English teacher in Japan and Freddie does not disagree that the academic talent in the family went that way. What, for instance, would he have done had it not been for cricket? "Interesting that, haven't a clue." Not an English teacher in Japan.

He can dominate a room as he can at the crease. The batsman who the season before last took 34 runs off a single over from Tudor and last season blasted 143 in 66 balls in a National League match is, it should come as no surprise, boisterous. He larks about - it would be advisable not to arm wrestle against him with either right or left hand - and those who would remind him that Test cricket is a tough school should remember that to curb his natural gaiety would diminish him.

In the guide accompanying the England tour, Flintoff's weight is listed as 13st 10lb. It was tempting to think that this was a clumsy attempt by the England and Wales Cricket Board to cover up the truth or that the player had lost a leg. If Flintoff is 13st 10lb, the Wanderers last week was a perfect batting strip. At present he tips the scales at 17st and it might be a permanent struggle to stay so slender.

"Well, I like eating and I like eating the wrong things," he said. "It's hard, but Steve Hampson, the British rugby league player, has been fantastic for me with training and dropping weight. Last winter I lost two stones before the tour started, this year it was a stone." Presumably, he had put back on some of what he had lost. The outcome of the first liaison with Hampson, after he had been dressed down by the ECB, was a successful A tour which earned him selection for the World Cup.

It is perhaps Flintoff's mass that has led to back trouble. Everybody agrees that he is capable of delivering the so-called heavy ball and his first, so far solitary, Test wicket was that of Jacques Kallis on his debut at Trent Bridge last year. But he has rarely been fit to bowl. At the start of this tour he broke down again. Fortunately, a series of exercises, a visit to a specialist and perhaps the realisation that he needed to bowl to make the side conspired to do the trick.

There is a lovely, charming, artless way to this big lad from Preston. ("I moved to be nearer Old Trafford last summer because I'm useless at getting up, but my mates are still back home and when I walk in the pub they never mention cricket, oh, unless I've done badly when they give me grief for five minutes.")

On this tour, Freddie has acquired a new nickname, Mongo, after the gigantic, slow-witted individual from the film Blazing Saddles, who floored a horse. There is no escaping the size of Freddie's frame and in the next two months or so we shall begin to discover if he has the heart to match.