On the day I left England in 2005, I bought The Sun. Hey, I was in a good mood, and it had been that sort of summer. I still remember the headline: ‘£3m Won’t Change Me: Freddie.’ Although the £3 million was a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of what Flintoff’s sporting accomplishments could be parlayed into, I felt an instant foreboding. Not because I considered Andrew Flintoff to be especially greedy or venal, but because here was this marvellous, magnanimous, fresh, fun sports personality who lived in the moment of his triumphs, and already his value was being assessed, monetised, commodified. I also knew that, however pure Flintoff’s intentions, he would be changed by £3 million, or however much his commercial value was ascertained to be: money changes everything it touches.

The money that ultimately changed the course of Flintoff’s career was $US1.55 million: the sum, $US600,000 in excess of his base fee, for which his services were acquired by the Chennai Super Kings XI in February. It proved a vast overestimate of Flintoff’s value, and he became the Spruce Goose of the Indian Premier League: an exorbitantly expensive, low-flying fancy destined for the hangar, never to return. Worse, the medial tear in the meniscus of his right knee, with which he was invalided home, is the injury he aggravated at Sophia Gardens – an indisposition as disappointing as it was inevitable. At the start of the season, Flintoff’s manager mooted his client becoming a have-aura-will-travel Twenty20 marquee player. It has come sooner rather than later, but it was always coming – perhaps since I saw that headline in the Sun four years ago.