The Irony Of It All

The storm in this week’s tea cup (or is that this week’s storm in the tea cup, I’m not sure, although I don’t think it especially matters) is dredging up of Fredalogate which happened, as far as I can tell, for exactly no reason whatsoever. Whether or not some cricket journo was having a really slow day and decided to cause some mischief, I’m not sure, but the short version of events is that Vaughan apparently blamed Fred for England’s failure in the World Cup, Jim Cumbes (Chief Exec at Lancashire) wagged his finger at Vaughan saying he was out of line and his comments were ‘despicable’, Vaughan then blamed the Guardian for “misquoting” him and now the Guardian have come back and said they didn’t misquote him at all and, well, it’s a whole bloody mess which was never really needed.

The guts of the problem are in the comments Vaughan made about Freddie and the “pedalo incident” where Vaughan said that following Fredalogate, in which Fred was stripped of the captaincy and the whole team got a public ear-bashing, it was impossible for any team spirit to flourish and that was the cause of England’s poor showing in the World Cup. The point obviously is not that England performed so poorly in the World Cup, it is in fact that Vaughan is seen to be slagging off Freddie in public which is, obviously, a huge no-no. Despite his recent lack of form, injuries and misdemeanours, Freddie is still King Freddie in the eyes of most Englishmen. Amusingly enough, the BBC elevated Fred even beyond “King” level with some presumably unintentional capitalisation, when quoting Vaughan talking about England cricket’s apparent saviour:

“We move on, He’s looking forward to playing cricket and getting back in the England team. We need him in the England cricket team.”

Was Vaughan out of order? Probably. Should we really care? Not really. Has anything been said that everyone wasn’t already thinking? Of course not. Should this whole fiasco never have been allowed to surface? Absolutely.

The irony of this situation which is apparently lost on everyone is that this is precisely the sort of bad press that surrounded England in the World Cup, exactly the sort of bad press that Vaughan was referring to in destroying England’s team spirit, and yet here we are again in exactly the same position days before England are due to start a test match against the West Indies. On the back of a convincing win against in the 2nd test, with new players, new management, new joys and success absolutely the last thing that the England, team and camp needed was to have something like this bandied about the press – that it has happened is the truly despicable thing.