Don’t focus on Stokes

Symonds: Australian cricket has its own issues

ANDREW Symonds believes the Ben Stokes incident isn’t so much a red face for Australian cricket as it is a red herring.

There is a growing opinion around the game that administrators went too hard at Steve Smith and David Warner by consigning them to 12-month bans for ball-tampering which include domestic cricket.

That feeling has only been exacerbated by the fact England star Stokes is a chance to play in the Big Bash despite his role in a street brawl, yet Smith and Warner aren’t.

Stokes was found not guilty of affray by a Bristol court, but many feel his actions knocking two men unconscious outside a nightclub brought the game into disrepute and warranted a stronger response than has so far been forthcoming from the England Cricket Board.

The comparison between Stokes, who could play in England’s next Test, and Smith and Warner, who have been banished from all levels of the game in Australia, is stark.

However, Symonds says that rather than be embarrassed by the contrast between the two cases, Australian cricket must not be distracted.

With a full-scale cultural review under way supposedly examining every level of Cricket Australia, the problems highlighted by ‘Sandpapergate’ are a long way from over.

Symonds, no stranger to disciplinary issues during his own career, says Stokes’ fate is irrelevant in Australia’s quest to address its own issues.

“Australian cricket needs to concentrate on what’s in front of them,” said the straightshooting Symonds, who has signed on as another star commentator for Fox Cricket.

“As a unit they have been seen to have made a substantial mistake.

“Don’t worry about Ben Stokes. Don’t worry about what other countries are doing. We need to worry about what we’re doing as a group, a unit and as a team.

“If we get distracted with the ‘He said, she said, he got this, she got that’, that’s just wasted energy.

“We’ve got way too much to do in our own backyard without worrying about Ben Stokes and the way England Cricket have treated him.”