The ECB and the player himself insist that Andrew Flintoff's knee injury was just down to bad luck. It's not. Freddie should have listened to his body, and turned down the IPL contract with Chennai Super Kings.
The news that Andrew Flintoff has been forced to pull out of the Indian Premier League has prompted a wave of complaints at the decision of the England and Wales Cricket board [ECB] to allow him to play in the first place.
Scans showed a slight medial meniscal tear on Flintoff’s right knee, and the subsequent operation will see Flintoff miss the Tests against the West Indies in May.
The ECB made the decision to allow their leading players to feature in the IPL for a two-week window at the start of a jam-packed summer that includes the ICC World Twenty20 and a home Ashes series.
However, the desire of the players to take part in the IPL tournament forced the ECB’s hands.
The ECB feared that the players would not sign central contracts unless a compromise was reached that allowed them to earn the IPL riches.
It is Flintoff himself who is at fault for the injury and the setback to England's hopes of success this summer.
Flintoff knows his own body, knows that he is prone to injury, and knows that it takes him a long-time to rediscover his form when he does come back from injury. The statistics do not lie. Flintoff has played just 75 of a possible 136 Tests since his debut in 1998. He has suffered ankle injuries, hernias, side strains, groin injuries.
And now, seventy days before the Ashes start, he is out injured again. Flintoff said before the IPL tournament that short sharp bursts in Twenty20 cricket would benefit his game. He insisted that breaks from the game made him MORE susceptible to injury, not less.
Well, that has been shown up to be hogwash. 2009 is the defining summer of the autumn of Flintoff’s career. By opting to play in the IPL, he would have gone into the ICC World Twenty20 and the Ashes without a break, a rest that his battered body obviously craves.
Now he has an enforced break, but one where he will lose fitness as he recovers from (admittedly workaday) surgery.
Flintoff will argue that he has learned a lot even from his brief spell at Chennai Super Kings. The pelting his bowling got from AB de Villiers will have highlighted his limitations in the short form of the game. He has no slower ball, and is over-reliant on the accuracy of his yorker.
He perhaps hadn’t appreciated the kamikaze nature of IPL batting, with batsman more amenable to taking risks to deliveries that would be deemed good balls in ODI’s or Tests.
Flintoff will say that discovering his shortcomings before the ICC World Twenty20 means that his spell in the IPL can be filed under ‘constructive failure’.
But contrast Flintoff’s decision to take the money with that of his Australian counterparts. Cricket Australia made the decision to withdraw Shaun Tait from the IPL, lest the national team be affected by complications from his hamstring injury. Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting decided to forego the riches on offer to prepare for the Ashes.
Flintoff should have done the same, for the good of English cricket and his own longevity at the top of the game.