So far in our series on cricket’s great boozing incidents, we’ve seen Ian Botham and chums have a massive Ashes piss-up and David Boon enjoy a relaxing flight to the UK.

The man, the legend…

With the rise of sports nutritionists and central contracts, we’ve seen a slight thinning out of cricketers who were also notable for their imbibing exploits. Then along came a big lad from Preston (who was genuinely pretty large at the start of his career). We’re not talking about Fredalo here (although we could do an entire article on that), nor the time when Mr Flintoff turned up to training drunk – we’re going back to the piss-up which began it all for Fred – the Ashes in 2005.

It was quite understandable that they should want to celebrate – after all, if we’d just won one of the greatest prizes in sport after 18 years of trying and dismally failing, during which time it was a notable achievement to have won a single match in a series, we’d probably have a few beers as well. However, enter Freddie Flintoff, Ashes hero, destroyer of Antipodean dreams, a man who in days of animal skins and spiked clubs would have walked around wearing a necklace made of the teeth of his conquered enemies, and possibly a skull-cap made of Adam Gilchrist’s scalp. These were the days when (for our younger readership) Freddie was at the peak of his powers, before injury, depression and an apparent addiction to Red Bull took their toll.
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