Former England cricket team all-rounder Andrew Flintoff revealed that he was on the verge of joining the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and even face The Undertaker in a fight. Flintoff said that he was offered an ‘obscene’ deal by the WWE to make the fight happen shortly after he announced his retirement from cricket. The cricketer, who played 227 international matches for England in his 12-year career, retired in 2010. Following the move, he said that he was not sure what his next move was going to be and his plan to fight The Undertaker in Manchester peaked the interest of WWE officials.

“I just hid for a bit and started to wonder, ‘What am I going to do now?’ Some of the TV offers started to come, which was never the plan – I stumbled into that. I nearly joined the WWE, I didn’t want to box, that was never the plan! I would have been called ‘Big Fred’!” he said on The Overlap’s Stick to Cricket.

“What happened was, it got to a point in Dubai where I was unfit, I’d put weight on and I was just not in a good place. I wanted to get fit again, but I needed motivation. As a kid, I loved WWE, so I came up with this idea, because I was doing League of Their Own with Sky, to fight the Undertaker in Manchester.”

“I wrote this treatment up and presented the idea to Sky, it started gathering momentum and next minute it’s being passed onto WWE. I was in contact with the WWE, Vince McMahon!”

Flintoff also revealed why the WWE deal eventually did not go through.

“Two weeks later, I got an email from WWE, saying, ‘You can’t do your documentary because you’ll give the secrets away, we want to put you on a three-year contract.’

“They said, ‘We’ll fast-track you and in 18 months you’ll be at WrestleMania and Royal Rumble.’

“The money was obscene, but we wanted to move back from Dubai. The kids wanted to play cricket and didn’t want to go to America, so I just changed it to boxing and had a fight instead.”