Has Freddie fired a blank?

I felt something hit me and, looking down, saw pellets on the ground. You expect to have plastic bottles thrown at you when you are playing on the sub-continent, but you don’t expect to be shot.

Nasser Hussain got very heated about it in the middle and Phil Neale, the tour manager, came to find out what was going on.

We carried on, but the whole thing seemed to get swept under the carpet. There was a big story back home to do with crowd disturbances, but Andrew Walpole, the ECB’s media relations manager, told me to play the incident down when I was interviewed the following day.

Looking back now, I think I should have made more of a stand because I wasn’t there to be shot at.

We explained it away as the crowd just being overexcited at the time, but I wasn’t sure about that at all. I realised how much you are in the public eye playing for England after I got a pair at Headingley in 1998.

My next game was a NatWest Trophy game down at Southampton and I got abused by these two blokes in the crowd for two hours or more.

They had a go at my pair, my weight, my family and everything. I know it was wrong when Eric Cantona went into the crowd to sort out that fan, but I was sorely tempted to follow his example.

EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 21

‘‘It’s news to me,’’ said Shirish Srivastava when told of Andrew Flintoff’s references to ‘‘pellets falling on the Kotla ground’’ during a one-dayer between India and England in 2002. Srivastava should know: The former Delhi leg-spinner was acting as local manager for the visitors during the match in question.

‘‘It’s the first time I’m hearing of such a thing’’, Srivastava told The Indian Express today, recalling the incident of January 31, 2002. ‘‘I spent most of the match with the players inside the dressing room and such an incident could not have escaped my attention.’’ ‘‘If such an incident had taken place, the administrative manager attached with the visiting team would surely have brought it to my notice. But he never did,’’ Srivastava added.

The former Delhi cricketer, however, remembers another ‘incident’ that took place during that game. ‘‘When Trescothick got out, the England opener was so angry with himself that he threw his helmet on the ground on returning to the dressing room. The helmet had a crack and I had to get it repaired as the England batsman was very particular that he play his next match with the same head gear.’’

Delhi Police officials also rubbished Flintoff’s claims. ‘‘No such incident ever took place during the match nor any complaint was given to us,’’ said a senior police officer.

They said such an incident was improbable given the tight security at the stadium. ‘‘Had there been any firing incident, someone from the crowd would have heard some noise or seen anyone taking aim. Even the shots which hit Flintoff would have caused some injury,’’ argued a senior officer.

Former India opener Chetan Chauhan was in charge of the players’ enclosures that day and he, too, dismisses the ‘revelations’.