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When his Northern Superchargers take on the Trent Rockets on Friday night, Andrew Flintoff will be “at his happiest” and “raring to go” in his first head coaching position. That’s the word from Kyle Hogg, who has been Flintoff’s right-hand man and Superchargers assistant since they were kids travelling across Lancashire together.
“I was around Lancs as a 16-year-old playing in the second team, and he’d have been 19 or 20,” Hogg told. “I don’t want to say he took me under his wing – but he probably did, really. He looked after me in the dressing room and we’ve been close friends for about 25 years, which is scary. He’s never changed one bit from the first day I met him to today.”
Hogg, an assistant coach for the Thunder women’s team and a former pathway coach at Lancashire, was asked late in the previous season if he would be interested in collaborating with Flintoff in the Hundred. It didn’t take Hogg long to win him over after their recent collaboration on the BBC series Field of Dreams: ‘Anytime he comes calling, you’ve never turning him down’.
Flintoff has been working in England’s white-ball set-up as an assistant coach and has been mentioned as a potential successor to Matthew Mott. But Hogg played those links down, saying: “He’s been in TV for the last 15 years. This is his first time in cricket, so I guess it’s, see how he finds it. What happens in the future, who knows?
“But at the moment, he loves being part of cricket again… He went from being a cricketer to, every time you switch a TV on, he was doing something different. But he’s never changed once. He’s got his core group of friends who have always been there, forever. He’s had a tough few years, and it’s great to see him back in a cricket environment.”
The Superchargers have a dearth of players to the point where their strength and conditioning coach participated in the South Asian Cricket Academy practice match on Wednesday. Ben Stokes and Harry Brook are with the England Test team; Mitchell Santner and Nicholas Pooran are playing Major League Cricket; while Reece Topley will be out for at least a week due to a finger injury. England will at least provide Matthew Potts and Dillon Pennington.
Hogg, who played for Lancashire’s first team for 14 seasons, acknowledged that it was unusual to be in the home dressing room at Headingley, the location of Yorkshire’s bitter rivals. “It is probably hard to get your head around it,” he stated. “However, it feels great to be here and feel like we belong. This is what we desire as our stronghold.”