Post Political Times

Freddie, Shrek and the King of Spain

I am one of the millions of people hooked by the current cricket series between England and Australia. When you look for things that are peculiarly English and that you can be proud of then cricket comes high on my list.

The casual observer may be surprised when tuning in to see the odd Spanish flag in the crowd and banners along the lines of ‘nobody expects the King of Spain’. Cricket has not traditionally been a big sport in Spain and King Juan Carlos has yet to have been picked as a member of the England team.

The answer of course lies in another English tradition – nicknaming.

Andrew Flintoff’s name sounds like Flintstone and he is big so he has morphed into ‘Freddie’ for all cricket fans. Snaggle-toothed, mop-haired Matthew Hoggard has acquired the name ‘Shrek’ for visually obvious reasons.

But the best of all has to be Ashley Giles, the ‘King of Spain’. He had mugs made up for his testimonial year that should have described him as the ‘King of Spin’ (bowling) but a misprint occurred and the rest is history. Combine this with the archetypally English humour (though like the England team the Monty Python team had the benefit of a large dose of Jones Welshness) of Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition joke and you arrive at ‘nobody expects the King of Spain’ as a call for Ashley Giles to bowl tricky spin balls.

I guess the fact that you have four or five days during a test match to talk about the players and develop the running jokes contributes to the complexity. What a fine sport.