One of England’s best all-rounders of all times and certainly the best at the current moment, Andrew Flintoff, has decided to hang his boots from international test match cricket. However, he has said that he will continue playing in the other formats of the game; the ODIs and the T20Is. He has announced that the last four games in the Ashes will be his final swansong, and that he will play through pain if necessary.
Flintoff’s decision comes a couple of days after he was diagnosed with another problem with the knee because of which he was deemed to undergo a fitness test for the second Ashes test match at Lord’s. This was in continuation to his previous injuries to his ankle and to the same knee, which had seen him feature in only three games of the Indian Premier League and miss the ICC World T20 competition. He had also been ruled out of the test series against West Indies, but had regained the fitness for the Ashes.
However, even as England battled to save the game, Flintoff felt recurring pain on the same knee and had to take injections for soreness and swelling. In the press conference, he said that he took this (four ankle operations and a knee surgery) as a signal from his body to stop playing the longer format of the game.
His captain, Andrew Strauss was obviously disappointed, but he also said that he expected the move to come in sooner than later. He praised the Lancastrian by saying that Flintoff has had a very positive effect on English cricket as a whole and the statistics do not paint the whole picture.
It was true that Flintoff had been going through quite a lot in terms of his fitness and the five-day format.
Clearly, this is a worrying trend in which there will be an increasing number of cricketers wanting to take the cricket’s VRS and get into the various leagues full time, thus depriving the international cricket of stars; something that the fans look forward to.
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