‘Talk about grassroots cricket,” says Freddie Flintoff, leaning on a rickety railing outside a dilapidated Liverpool sports club. “This is in t’soil, this.” After three years on air, Field of Dreams, the documentary where the former England captain trains teenagers from deprived areas to play a sport they have no previous interest in, has reset to zero. His original group of lads from Preston, Lancashire, have become a team (season one) that has toured India (season two). They returned as young men who love cricket but no longer need their friend Fred’s help.
For the series to continue, the format needs to start again. And it is now a format: all the emotions and challenges are familiar as Flintoff arrives in Bootle, Liverpool, another neglected area of deindustrialised north-west England. A representative of the local cricket club, once a thriving community hub that is now regularly vandalised, takes Flintoff on a tour of the neighbourhood’s derelict and boarded-up buildings, explaining that kids there commit petty crime and join gangs for a lack of anything else to do. When Flintoff visits a class of 16-year-old boys at a PRU – a pupil referral unit, ie a school for children who are unable or no longer welcome to attend mainstream schools – they have never heard of him and think cricket is a way for posh eccentrics to waste time.
But even as they snigger at the idea of cricket and report that the dominant after-school activity in Bootle is smoking weed, we can see some of the sparkling potential that took a while to identify in Preston. At a park knockabout session overseen by Kyle, the gentle assistant coach who fills in when Freddie is off on celebrity business, the first wave of volunteers enjoy giving cricket a go, and key personalities emerge in the form of natural leader Ryan and charismatic trouble-maker Stevie. When the lads’ behavioural issues cause strife at a subsequent training session and Flintoff makes his comment about this being something beyond grassroots sport, we suspect it will all come good in the end.
A cynical viewer might check out here, feeling vindicated in their suspicion that Field of Dreams is a comforting fantasy: its miracle transformations only happen to young people who have won the lottery and been visited by a superstar with TV cash behind him. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that the show is a beacon of hope. It may put these kids into unusual circumstances, but the qualities it brings out of them – the energy, the humour, the desire to achieve – are not unusual at all. They are in every young person, not far below the surface. Organised sport brings them out, and Field of Dreams does not have to do much to demonstrate that. Flintoff’s fame is a shortcut to success, but the time and money the show invests are not massive. The experiment could be replicated.
To underline the point, this year Flintoff runs several teams at once. Soon he is at South Shore Cricket and Squash Club in Blackpool, which is like every other venue in Field of Dreams: a sad relic that would easily be revived by a minor adjustment in national budgeting priorities. In the bar, a lonely room still warmed by good times of the past, one of the senior members looks as though he is holding back tears as he concedes that the club currently has no youth team, which means it is doomed.
Flintoff and co set up a girls’ squad, which means a change to the show’s regular rhythms. Getting the new recruits to concentrate on the game and not muck about is not a problem, but communicating with them is. “With the lads you just chat, you’ve got an idea of what they’re going to say,” says our hero, flummoxed and a little scared by all the probing questions, unpredictable emotions and sudden outbreaks of dancing. “With the girls, no.” When 16-year-old Madison fixes Flintoff with her gaze and asks how he recovered mentally from the serious car crash he was involved in three years ago, and the permanent change to his physical appearance it caused, we see him surprise himself with a revealing, vulnerable answer about dealing with depression and struggling to achieve self-acceptance, and how those problems were already there before the accident.
That Flintoff is not your average alpha male sports legend is one more reason why we can tolerate him going through the reality-TV motions of questioning whether the girls’ team will flourish, when we are sure it will. His uniquely nuanced charm, and the important core message Field of Dreams plaintively sends out, still deserve our wholehearted support.
