Troubled genius ahead of his time as early power-hitter
Andrew Symonds was a pioneer of power-hitting. He had a troubled life – born of West Indian heritage in Birmingham, adopted, then taken as a baby to Australia when the country still struggled with race relations – but there is no doubt he played an important role in cricket’s evolution. When Symonds was signed by Gloucestershire in 1995, aged only 19, he introduced a novel form of practice in place of old-fashioned nets. He batted in the middle, someone threw balls at him, and everyone else involved spread out in the stands as he tried to hit every ball for six and almost always did.
This was eight years before the T20 format was introduced into professional cricket. Symonds was ahead of his time.
Not until almost the end of his career did the Indian Premier League begin, when he was sold in the auction for $1.3million. As a power-hitter, and a bowler who could deliver medium-pace or offspin, and a “gun-fielder”, he would surely be the biggest earner in the IPL were he now in his prime.
Symonds was soon putting his practice into effect. He set a record for the most sixes in a championship innings when batting against Glamorgan at Abergavenny in 1995 when aged just 20. He hit 16 sixes in his first innings of 254 and four more in his second, making 20, another record. The ground had a very short midwicket boundary on one side, but not all the way round. Only this summer did Ben Stokes set a new record for a championship innings.
Being so strong and athletic that he could hit almost every ball for six made building long red-ball innings a challenge, but Symonds made it in the end to become a Test batsman, in the period when Australia were over-supplied with top-class players. He averaged 40 in his 26 Tests, which would have given him a longer run anywhere else.
His finest innings came during the Ashes series of 2006-7. England were rolled over cheaply as usual in Melbourne, but Australia were struggling, too, at 84 for five when Symonds joined Matthew Hayden. The pair were big mates, in the Queensland team together and in the same boat, literally, too when they went fishing.
Hayden hit 153, Symonds 156, and together they added 279 to crush England by an innings, on the way to Australia’s 5-0 whitewash. Symonds featured again in the last Test in Sydney, although there is no mention in any scorecard. He was a member of the ring of Australia’s cover-fielders who hunted like a pack to stop England scoring. Mike Hussey, Michael Clarke and Symonds fielded like predators so that not even Kevin Pietersen in his prime could pierce the off-side field.
But white-ball cricket was where Symonds naturally peaked. He scored more than 5,000 runs in oneday internationals at the rattling rate of 92 per 100 balls, again ahead of his time: even now Stokes, a comparable all-rounder, has a strike-rate of 95. Symonds was a member of Australia’s World Cup-winning sides of 2003 and 2007, and took 133 ODI wickets with his medium-pacers or off-spinners.
T20, though, was his ideal format – or would have been, had he been born a few years later.
As it was, in his few T20 internationals he averaged 48 – and only two players, Virat Kohli of India and Mohammad Rizwan of Pakistan, have averaged higher.
Symonds had his off-days, too – and nights. One of the more consequential drinking incidents occurred in 2005. Australia, incredibly, lost to Bangladesh in a tri-series game in Cardiff.
The next day, a Sunday, Australia had to play England in Bristol and Symonds was dropped for excessive drinking the previous evening.
England seized the opportunity to steal a march on Australia, who had been thumping them consistently for the previous 15 years. They won the Bristol one-dayer in style, Pietersen overwhelming the Australian bowlers, and a new era was born, culminating in England regaining the Ashes.
England last came across Symonds on their 2017-18 Ashes tour when they played a warm-up game in Townsville in northern Queensland. He had become the king of Townsville cricket, and settled down there, starting a career as one of Australia’s better commentators – not quite fully fulfilled, but a prodigious talent who through no fault of his own was ahead of his time.