'I just want to give him a hug': Mail Sport sits down with David 'Bumble' Lloyd to watch the harrowing documentary about his friend Andrew Flintoff's horrific accident
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The cry of ‘no’ reverberating off the walls of our makeshift morning cinema carries more force than any he directed at a batting partner during a 20-year professional career.
David Lloyd winces as Andrew Flintoff charts his horrific, un-helmeted journey, face down across 50 yards of Tarmac at a Surrey airfield after the three-wheeler sports car he was driving flipped.
Moments later, the first of multiple Bumble F bombs bounces off the table as Mr Jahrad Haq, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, pauses between explaining: ‘You’ve just got to get the anatomy back to how it was in the first place.’ And: ‘It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Almost always all the pieces are there. In Andrew’s case, they weren’t.’
Mail Sport’s Lloyd is one of the prominent interviewees in the new Disney+ documentary by BAFTA-award-winning director John Dower, which has Flintoff speaking in unfiltered detail about the accident in the Morgan Super 3 at the Dunsfold Aerodrome in December 2022 when he was filming a Top Gear episode.
But this showing, just hours after its public release, is the first time Lloyd, 78, has seen it.
And the images of Flintoff’s disfigurement it contains. The gruesome pictures taken upon his arrival at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, via air ambulance and before and after five hours of surgery, are all there. It’s a real warts-and-all affair. Only the odd tooth is missing. Or spearing through flesh it shouldn’t.
Over two hours, there is an outpouring of affection, and various degrees of that Bumble staple, laughter, yet he rarely unfolds his arms — a sign of self-protection. This is a very tough watch.
‘What strikes me, having seen these graphic injuries, is the genius of the surgeons. Absolute genius. God, I wasn’t prepared to see anything like that. Poor fella,’ Lloyd says.
The body language reflects his relationship with Flintoff, now 47. ‘I’ve known him since he was 14 years of age,’ he explains. ‘He’s like my fourth son. I’ve got three lads of my own, and he always called me his cricket dad. I’ve never called him Freddie. Never. Watching this, I bristle at news reporters calling him Freddie Flintoff. He’s called Andrew.’
Lloyd was instrumental in Flintoff’s career. First, as the man who signed him for Lancashire, over a cup of tea — ‘best China out’ — in the front room of the family home in Preston.
‘We didn’t discover Andrew Flintoff, it was just a matter of course that he would come to us even though there was an approach from another county, Northamptonshire, who offered him a scholarship with Oundle School. Me being me, I told him, “I’ll drive you down to Northampton, to the home of cricket, Wantage Road, have a look around and then bring you back to Old Trafford. Then you can decide”.’
Later, he was England coach when Flintoff made his Test debut in 1998. Two years on, when the media — of which Lloyd was now a part — focused attention on his weight, there was sympathy from his old boss.
‘He was a good size, but I didn’t think it was appropriate to criticise a young kid like that,’ he says, as a clip of him receiving man-of-the-match acclaim from television reporter Paul Allott is re-run. ‘Not bad for a fat lad,’ was the deadpan Flintoff response.
‘He wasn’t a fat lad,’ says Lloyd, trying to change the mood. ‘Rob Key was a fat lad! With Flintoff we saw a skinny, gawky kid at 15 to 17 filling out. If you’d said the same thing about Ian Botham, he’d have absolutely loved it. He’d double up. Get a bit bigger. But Andrew was a sensitive lad.’
And Lloyd’s influence played a crucial part in Flintoff’s return. ‘I’m full of drugs. I want to get back into cricket,’ Flintoff told Lloyd in a phone call from his hospital bed, before being discharged in early 2023.
As the documentary reveals, Lloyd then contacted Key, England’s managing director of cricket, who arranged for his old friend to watch that summer’s Ashes matches incognito in the grounds.
And that led to an emotional reunion during the Manchester Test. Pausing the film, and collecting his thoughts, Lloyd continues: ‘I got a message from Rob to say, “Andrew’s here”. Every journalist in the world would have wanted something on that, and nobody knew that he was 10 yards away from them, behind a wall, in a room adjacent to the press box. Out of loyalty, I kept it to myself.
‘So I went in and he had a scarf across his face. Then he took the scarf away. Now, my dad worked in an operating theatre, and he would see some gruesome things, and I’d chat to him about his job. He always said that with horrific injuries, when you’re talking to the person, you can’t spotlight those injuries.
‘There was a young girl who had a sledging accident, hitting her head on a brick post, who was never the same again, and he would visit her all the time, sometimes with me in tow. With Andrew, it absolutely took my breath away when the covering came off, but aware that my eyes were opening wider, I thought, “No, you can’t let him see this”.
‘So I composed myself, we just carried on the conversation, and he put the scarf back. All I wanted to do was burst into tears and give him a hug.’
Naturally, the life-changing injuries are a recurring theme of the biopic and as Flintoff discusses coming to terms with the changes in his appearance and outlook, Bumble sinks in his chair, sighing in response to Flintoff’s revelation: ‘I’ve got PTSD, and I get anxious for a period of time. I just find myself crying for no particular reason.’
As if transported back to the Old Trafford dressing room of the Nineties, Bumble reaches now and again for the gallows humour to break the sombre silences. ‘I’ll tell you what, though, to see him now, he’d get some great parts in gangster movies. Folk would run a mile from him,’ he chuckles.
But there is no diluting the admiration in which he holds his friend. ‘He’s had a massive setback in life, and he’s come through it as he would do, as he always has done. Come through with a lot of heartache and a lot of unbelievable family support, which is the paramount thing — the kids are great, his wife, Rachael, is a gem, parents are great and his friendships are rock solid — he’s come through.’
Lloyd nods along as Flintoff’s self-doubt as a player is acknowledged on screen by the man himself and former team-mates such as Michael Vaughan. It manifested itself most strongly one-fifth of the way through the greatest series of them all. The one which saw Flintoff not only transcend cricket, but sport: the 2005 Ashes. Weighed down by the pressure following a heavy first Test defeat, he refuelled himself on red wine and cigars at Bovey Castle in Devon and re-emerged at Edgbaston to ‘play on my own terms’.
Channelled by a desire to make Ricky Ponting eat his words from Lord’s — ‘I bet the sponsors are really happy they’ve got you two f***wits,’ in reference to Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen using Woodworm bats — Lloyd reckons the England all-rounder reached ‘gold standard’ with his over to the Australia captain in the second Test at Edgbaston that culminated with his dismissal for nought.
‘That was a huge mistake by Ricky, because he has a very good memory bank. Andrew’s a wonderful chess player,’ Lloyd smiles. ‘Ricky, I love you to bits, but don’t poke the bear. That line probably cost you the Ashes.’
We are watching in a Leeds pub, a 20-minute ring-road dash from Headingley, scene of two Ashes miracles by rival all-rounders — Botham’s 500-1 turnaround of the 1981 Test and Ben Stokes’s one-man crusade against Australia six years ago.
Yet it is a snapshot of Flintoff that Bumble thinks of whenever he recalls his favourite Ashes moments, as he does here over a cappuccino. Not the messiah pose of 2009 at Lord’s — a moment of self-indulgence driven by the knowledge, knee shot to bits, that he would never again be able to bowl in such a hostile manner again — but an incredible piece of fielding involving Ponting in the final Test at the Oval that year.
‘Ricky’s run because he thinks Andrew’s only got one leg. He can’t move, there’s a single there. As soon as he set off, though, I moved forward in my seat and everything happened in slow motion. Quick to the ball, clean pick up and accurate throw. A run out like that is a three-stage event and all have to be 10 out of 10. He was short by two inches. It was a perfect moment. It was a series-winning moment and that’s why it sticks in my mind.’
It was also the last meaningful act of a top-level career. ‘His body was closing down, there was an undeniable feeling within that he couldn’t fulfil his dreams and ambitions. He got really angry, resented cricket. Went from being a national treasure to rebelling against the game.
‘A lot of us, Key and Steve Harmison included, thought he’d come back. It’s my own opinion that he would have done so notwithstanding the accident. To be a part of the journey with his lads, Rocky and Corey.’
And there is one final reflection as Lloyd digests the last morsels of an offering that contains enough sweet to balance the sour. ‘This should win awards. The public will see what a superstar bloke this lad from Preston became.’
