Andrew Flintoff, whose talismanic performances inspired England to an Ashes triumph, has revealed that he was shot at while fielding during a one-day international against India almost four years ago. The team management persuaded Flintoff to play down the incident at Delhi in January 2002, but he now feels that more should have been made of the incident, subsequently swept under the carpet as the action of an overexcited crowd. In an extract from his book, Being Freddie, which was published in The Times in London, Flintoff says: "I felt something hit me and, looking down, saw pellets on the ground. You expect to have plastic bottles thrown at you when you are playing on the sub-continent, but you don't expect to be shot."
As much as the incident itself, Flintoff claims that he was rattled by what followed. "Nasser Hussain got very heated about it in the middle and Phil Neale, the tour manager, came to find out what was going on, but the whole thing seemed to get swept under the carpet," he says. "There was a big story back home to do with crowd disturbances, but Andrew Walpole, the ECB's media relations manager, told me to play the incident down when I was interviewed the following day.
"Looking back now, I think I should have made more of a stand because I wasn't there to be shot at. We explained it away as the crowd just being overexcited at the time, but I wasn't sure about that at all."
i was just wondering
:And why that idiot didn't shoot him properly.
