Fred deserves a place in the pantheon of sporting greats

One of the greatest spectating moments in my life occurred at the Oval in the decisive Test of the last home Ashes series. A full house that was as pumped as a football crowd when the teams came out, knowing that they could be there to witness the Ashes regained, had been quietened by a long partnership between Australia's admirable skipper Ricky Ponting and Hussey, who between them had added 127 for the third wicket. They looked set fair to bat deep into the day, frustrate England and deny a full house the chance to see the urn lifted.

Step forward Freddie Flintoff. A direct hit from mid-off as the Aussies run for what looks like a straightforward single sends the off-stump cartwheeling and Ponting back to the pavilion. The run-out had to be checked by the fourth umpire but Flintoff knew, already knew, that he had his man. Standing with both arms in the air on the last day of his Test career, the stage was his and he'd turned the Test back towards England in an instant. It was a fantastic moment, a colossus of world cricket standing like a victorious invading king, dominating a stage suitably grand to host his talent and his impact on the game.

So I got to see England lift the urn on the fourth day of the fifth Test of the 2009 series, comfortably the best moment of a long few months which saw me out of work, in debt to friends and family and generally feeling at a low ebb. All that, everything, just for a few glorious hours, was forgotten, and with the exception of those clad in green and gold in that stadium, spirits were lifted into the stratosphere by a team galvanised by another moment of genius from a man who'd provided so many of them.

Flintoff was hugely popular not just because of his ability but because of the man he was, and is. A modern-day Botham, unpredictable, unconventional, aggressive, intimidating to play against, and with, I wouldn't be surprised to hear. He battled jibes about his weight early in his career, the disapproval of the men in suits (and his own coach) with his off the field antics and the expectation of the most boisterous and numerous supporters in Test cricket. Cricket fans loved him because he came across as one of us, but with all the talent we weren't born with, collectively, distilled into him. He was seen basically shit-faced on the celebratory open-topped bus after the 2005 Ashes series victory. What a disgrace, the stuffed shirts said. What a hero, the equally inebriated fans thought - he's celebrating as hard as we are, there's a man who knows how much it means to people because it means as much to him.

For me the moment which defines him as a great is the iconic shot of him consoling Brett Lee in the immediate aftermath of England's victory in the Edgbaston Test of that never-to-be-forgotten 2005 series. Australia so nearly hung on to dash England's hopes of victory, only to be denied, desperately, at the last. Amid wild celebration, Flintoff took a moment to console the Aussie paceman and congratulate him on what he'd come so close to achieving with the bat. It showed, in one moment, that Freddie Flintoff understands cricket better than anybody who'd criticised him for any of what they thought of as his misdemeanours, and fully deserves the plaudits that will doubtless rain down on him now. Enjoy your retirement, Fred.

On windows, scandals and unmaskings

So the artificial thrill of the closure of the transfer window has come and gone. There were, of course, countless shots of reporters standing outside stadia or training complexes desperately filling as, as far as we could tell, absolutely nothing happened for hours at a time. And then the usual rash of last-minute deals going through, either dashing or perhaps in Stoke City's case exceeding the inflated expectations of fans. I always wonder why these deals couldn't have gone through sooner - all the top flight managers must have had some idea of the composition of the bulk of their 25-man squads for this season, for example, so why all the frantic wheeler-dealing at the last minute? It almost seems as if the whole system was concocted by the authorities to give the media another set of scaffolding to construct yet more temporary and rickety 'drama'.

Anyway, in the end Albion signed a speed-merchant with no final ball who's well known to us already from an earlier loan, a completely unkown to us teenager from Scandanavia and a striker from the Scottish Premier League. A mixed bag if ever there were one, time will tell if the increasingly polyglot squad has what it takes.

More genuinely newsworthy and infinitely more depressing was yet another scandal surrounding the Pakistani cricket team, I'm sure you're all aware of the details. It's a depressing fact that a sport that was once seen as a bastion of fair play and good sportsmanship is increasingly seeing that coda erroded by the malicious influence of money. No longer is it immune from the same ravages which afflict football in various parts of the world, all spawned out of money, be they greed, corruption, match-fixing, whatever it is.

My natural bleeding-heart liberal tendency is to feel some sympathy for the young players involved, thrust from poverty into a very, very different world and doubtless taken advantage of with the promise of more money than they'd seen in their young lives, but the fact is that the book absolutely has to be thrown at anybody who besmirches sport in this way. Pakistani cricket has a long, ignoble and entirely regrettable history of seeming to punish such wrongdoing to the fullest possible extent in the past, only to then soften or entirely retract those punishments when later circumstances made it desirable to do so. If it happens again this time, Pakistani cricket may as well lose their Test-playing status. Bad enough that their own country cannot host cricket due to the security situation, their cricket board appears beset by internicine strife and corruption, and their players are dismally failing to represent the honour of millions of people suffering desperately from the floods by underperforming so spectacularly. If it turns out that underperformance was even partly deliberate, they'll have spat in the faces of a loyal fan base and deserve never to play Test cricket again.

And a brief comment on the unmasking of the Stig. Speaking as an only occasional viewer of Top Gear, it really doesn't matter to me who's under that mask - it's only a TV conceit for Christ's sake. But if the bloke exposed as Stig signed a confidentiality agreement, how has he been allowed by a court to tear up that agreement? Surely he was in breach of contract? I don't understand the decision, as it seems that even in court, as on the cricket fields, honour counts for less and less these days.