Tonight:
5°c
So this, then, is to be Freddie Flintoff's last summer as a Test cricketer. After multiple operations and gruelling rounds of pain-killing injections, the hulking all-rounder was finally broken on what Steve Harmison, speaking of the wicket at Cardiff's Sophia Gardens, called yet another "chief executive's pitch". What he meant was that it was flat and inert, prepared to last five days to keep the money men happy.
If Test cricket is a dying game, as some such as West Indies captain Chris Gayle would have it - and when you look beyond England and an Ashes series you see only matches around the world being played in near-empty stadia - the loss of its greatest and best-loved entertainer may hasten the onset of its terminal phase.
Test cricket has for too long now been a batsman's game and, as a consequence, a duller one. Where now are the great fast bowlers? The most thrilling speedsters of recent years - Brett Lee, Shoaib Akhtar, Shane Bond, Simon Jones, Flintoff - are either too-often injured or prematurely retired, their enthusiasm diminished or their end quickened by the dead pitches on which they've been forced to bowl.
Much nonsense has been written about Flintoff's indiscipline, booze benders and waywardness. He certainly likes a drink. I was there at Rumours nightclub in Rodney Bay, St Lucia, in 2007, when Freddie stayed out too late following a World Cup defeat by New Zealand and had to be rescued from the sea after taking an unscheduled ride on a pedalo.
People were too hard on him then, as they were recently when he slept through an alarm call while on England duty in Belgium: only those who know him well know how hard he has worked to pull himself back, again and again, from debilitating injury.
"Freddie is the most selfless man I have ever met," says former Lancashire team-mate Stuart Law.
"I have seen him just after injury and he is destroyed, heartbroken and he feels that he is letting everybody down if he can't play like he is supposed to.
"His detractors, I'd like to see them live his life for a few weeks, to do all that rehab every day to fight back from his injuries . . . and to put himself through it again. They couldn't cope for more than a few minutes.
"Have these people never slept through an alarm? Maybe they have never worked hard enough to experience that. People always assume the worst."
It's being said that Flintoff is retiring from Tests now so he can stay in shape to chase the money in the IPL. Well, who would have guessed it? Yet in announcing his intention to retire from Test cricket, Flintoff is also accepting a painful truth: that his best has gone, and has been gone for several years, and his game is now all about managing decline and profiting from it.
In retrospect, Flintoff peaked in the summers of 2004 and 2005. That was his time, his belle epoque, when he played with such brilliance and uncomplicated delight against first the West Indies and then Australia.
He once spoke of having being given the "gift of cricket" and at times he has played as if blessed. He can walk away knowing that when it mattered most he stood tall, bowled fast, hit the ball hard and gave of his best. He did not squander that gift.
This week's reason to be cheerful
England's time-wasting
There has been a lot of po-faced moralising about England's bungled delaying tactics during the dramatic closing overs of the First Test at Cardiff. Come on everyone, let's enjoy it for what it was. The appearance at the wicket of the bemused and portly physio Steve McCaig alongside the trimly-bearded 12th man, Bilal Shafayat, was a moment of wonderful Keystone Kops-like comedy: neither man was quite able to disguise that he did not know what he was meant to be doing out there. Ricky Ponting called what happened “deeply ordinary”. I call it one of the highlights of the sporting summer so far.
