Andrew Symonds

The World Twenty20 starts this week, and Australia has already lost a warm-up match to Zimbabwe. It’s no toughie to work out why. Beyond Dave Warner, Shane Watson and Cameron White, our batting order lacks firepower. The bang crash wallop only one man can deliver. But that man, presumably, is on a fishing boat somewhere.

I was in India last week on assignment for Alpha magazine. One of my stops was the IPL match between Dave Warner’s Delhi Daredevils and the Deccan Chargers, captained by Adam Gilchrist and starring Andrew Symonds.

Symonds was just unbelievable. On a tricky, slow pitch where all other batsmen failed to dominate, he produced an array of heaves, swipes and dabs. One minute he swung his revolutionary Mongoose bat like a lumberjack. The next, it was a delicate wizard’s wand.

Continue reading "Come back Andrew Symonds, all is forgiven" »

With Swans coach Paul Roos all but saying he’d like forward Barry Hall to retire after landing another stray punch, the question is now being asked: how many chances should Hall get before he’s just sacked?

I’d ask another question. Is Barry Hall really as big and bad as he is being made out to be, or is the controversy just an indication of how soft football and sporting culture generally has become in Australia?

In short – and at risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw - are Bazza and the likes of Andrew Symonds really too hard or have we just become too soft?

Continue reading "The hard men that soft modern sport has left behind" »

Here is a question for your cricket club’s next trivia night. Name England’s Test all rounders between Botham and Flintoff - that is, over the fifteen year period from the 1986/87 Ashes, the scene of both Ian Botham’s last century and his final five wicket haul in an innings, to 2001/02, when Flintoff made the spot his own.

Chris Lewis may spring to mind, if only on account of last month’s conviction and thirteen year prison sentence for cocaine smuggling.

Lewis’ most memorable cricketing performance involved shaving his scalp, taking the field bare headed and coming down with sunstroke on England’s 1994 tour of the West Indies -  destined to be known evermore, courtesy of The Sun, as “the prat without a hat”.

Continue reading "There’s only one Ian Botham: selectors still living in past" »

UPDATED: Trouble follows him off the field like the ball does on it. It’s a shame because it’s a waste of talent and a let-down for cricket fans. There are few players better to watch when he starts tonking. There’s video below of the brilliance we now won’t be seeing in the Twenty20 World Cup, because Andrew Symonds has been sent home for breaking team rules.

Cricket Australia is booking his flights tonight. Precisely what happened is yet to emerge but it appears, as is usually the case when Symonds gets in trouble, there’s booze involved. Bizarrely it sounds like Symonds hasn’t repeated anything like turning up for a match drunk, like he did in 2005. CA boss James Sutherland said tonight: “the breaches that I am talking about are not serious, but in the scheme of things, in the scheme of history, they are enough for it to be the final straw”.

Twitter exploded with reaction after the story broke, and I guess the widespread disappointment shows the generally high regard in which Symonds is held, and the fact that people want him to come good.

I particularly liked this, from @KristinByrne:

Andrew Symonds: the only fun thing about cricket.

Anyway, Roy, as he’s known, wasn’t in the Ashes squad but he would have been a key player in the Twenty20 side. This might be the end of his international career. But how many chances should players like Symonds get?