Exuberant allrounder, who’d rather go fishing, was often in trouble off the field

Summoned to ameetingwith the besuited administrators of Australian cricket to discuss his contract, it was entirely typical that Andrew Symonds rocked up wearing a cowboy hat and jandals.

His carefree attitude as the boy from the bush who was more at home in the outback than in cricket’s hallowed pavilions brought him fame on the field and notoriety off it.

As a batsman he revelled in smiting the ball out of the park. There was a double century for Gloucestershire in 1995 that included 16 sixes, a first-class record until broken by the new England captain Ben Stokes 27 years later. His explosive batting helped Australia to win cricket’s one-dayWorld

Cup in 2003 and

2007 and there were brilliant

Test centuries against England and India. At his peak he was regarded as the best fielder in the world and as a bowler he could take wickets as amedium-paced seamer or offspinner.

Imposing in size, he cut a distinctive figure with his dreadlocks and white zinc cream smeared on his lips to protect them from the sun, before he eventually shaved his head on live television for charity in 2009.

Yet for all his lavish gifts on the cricket field, he often gave the impression that he would rather be elsewhere, preferably fishing or hunting wild pigs. His favourite reading was not Wisden but an Australian pig-hunting magazine called Bacon Busters. ‘‘It’s a pretty blokey mag but they have women in it too. There’s a ‘‘Boars and Babes’’ section with women in bikinis sitting on big old pigs,’’ he said approvingly.

If he wasn’t hunting or fishing he was usually to be found in a pub, downing rather too many cold ones. Sometimes he combined both passions, such as the occasion when he and fellow Australia cricketer Matthew Hayden were rescued from shark-infested seas after their fishing boat sank.

He showed up to training sessions still drunk, missed team buses and arrived for a game between Australia and Bangladesh in 2005 barely able to stand up. After a decade of such incidents, Symonds’ international cricket career ended when he was sent home from the 2009 T20 World Cup, his third expulsion from the Australian team in a year.

When he missed a team meeting before a game against Bangladesh in 2008 and went fishing instead, he was omitted from the tour to India as a punishment. When Australia lost that series 2-0 he was recalled but was soon in trouble again for a drunken interview in which he called New Zealand’s Brendon McCullum a ‘‘lump of shit’’ andmade comments about a fellow cricketer’s wife.

Yet despite such peccadillos, he was too good to be ignored when Australia picked their team for the T20 World Cup. Forced to sign a different contract to the rest of the

‘‘He wanted to have fun and play the game he remembered as a kid.’’ former Australian captain Mark Taylor remembering Andrew Symonds.

players that included a commitment not to drink, he broke it before a ball was even bowled. He was not an alcoholic, he insisted, but a binge drinker. ‘‘I go out and drink hard all in one hit - too fast, too much,’’ he said. He felt that the problem had spiralled out of control after a controversy when he accused India’s Harbhajan Singh of racially abusing him during the Sydney Test in 2008.

Symonds and his captain, Ricky Ponting, criticised the Australian cricket authorities for failing to back him because they were more worried by the loss of revenue if India carried out their threat to withdraw from the series.

‘‘I’d done some silly things but I needed support and it was non-existent due to money and politics,’’ Symonds said. ‘‘I started to drink heavily as a result of it and from that moment was my downhill slide.’’ It was a sad end to a career. When sober, he was honest and funny, with an infectious laugh and a smile that could light up a stadium.

Andrew Symonds was born in Birmingham, England, to parents he never knew, one of whom was Afro-Caribbean and the other Scandinavian. He was adopted by Ken and Barbara Symonds, schoolteachers, when he was three months old. ‘‘They got to take me home for aweek and trial me. Mum tells the story that I played up and was terrible. Theywent back and were asked, ‘How did it go?’ and she goes, ‘He was an angel. We’d like to keep him’.’’

Soon afterwards the family emigrated to Australia, first to Victoria and then northern Queensland, where Symonds embraced life as a rough-and-tumble country boy.

His cricket-loving father coached him in the backyard andwhen he was good enough to play for a junior XI in Townsville, 80 miles away, drove him there and back twice aweek.

He made his debut for Queensland in 1994 and for Australia in white-ball cricket four years later. His Test debut came in 2004.

After his international career ended he became the highest-paid overseas player in the Indian Premier League and a celebrity on the subcontinent, playing himself in the 2011 Bollywood film Patiala House and starring in the Indian version of Big Brother.

He is survived by his second wife, Laura, and two children. He divorced his first wife, Brooke, in 2005.

‘‘He wanted to have fun and play the game he remembered as a kid,’’ said the former Australian captain Mark Taylor. ‘‘He got in trouble for not going to training or having too many beers but that’s the way he lived his life and the way he wanted to play his cricket.’’ -