Freddie Flintoff's Balls Out Tour

The man has become a joke. 50p says he will be in panto next

Flintoff's latest offering is his TV spectacular 'Lord of The Fries' where he travels around the country in a fish and chip van. All the
hallmarks of an Alan Partridge pastiche but this is done in all seriousness.

www.sky.com/tv/show/flintoff-lord-of-the-fries/article/about

Even Flintoff admitted it was embarrassing as he sat on the Jonathan Ross couch between Stephen Fry (BAFTA host) and a BAFTA
actress contender (Theory of Everything).

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/freddie-flintoff-people-thought-cricket-8597014

But unless you become a SKY cricket commentator where do you end up after retiring if becoming a cricket coach doesn't appeal, where
saturation suffocates the last remaining vestige of dignified talent? Michael Vaughan, at least, has quietened down a little, although one
had to put up with his recent appearance on Room 101.

But as Chris Adams has discovered county cricket can be a wilderness of disappointments and frustration where being part of the ECB English
cricket mentality and its cliquey nature is of vital importance if a future job beckons. Meanwhile, those who became heroes on the pitch are now
the zeroes of the TV reality world, where you become judged alongside Jordan and her shallow cronies.

All very sad.

It's a sad indictment of the world we have created that he doesn't need a skill because the biggest selling commodity in vapid modern Britain is 'celebrity'.

You can argue that to an extent it always was. But back in the day, 'celebrity' meant 10 guineas to open a fete or a little bit more to appear in a six week panto season. Now it means sums said to range between £250-500k to appear on Big Brother or I'm A Celebrity.

That's the world Flintoff is entering and good luck to him. He's a working-class lad with little to offer once age laid waste to his sporting prowess. But at least he does have the satisfaction of having achieved something in his life, in contrast  - so far as I can tell - to the likes of Katie Price and Callum Best, with whom he is now destined to rub shoulders.

I've got far more respect for  the uneducated Flintoff exploiting his celebrity in whatever moronic but harmless way he can  than the public school twerps like Paul Downton, who leave cricket to go into banking where the main skills, we now discover,  lie in insider trading, tax evasion, fixing exchange  rates and piling up obscene personal bonuses.