Andrew Symonds
Big-hitting maverick cricketer who won two World Cups and cut a swathe through the one-day game
ANDREW SYMONDS, who has died in a car crash aged 46, was an Australian all-rounder whose striking of a cricket ball was ideally suited to the burgeoning one-day game. He was also a useful medium-pace bowler and an outstanding fielder – and with his dreadlocks, white zinc cream smeared liberally over his lips, and his fondness for beer, plain speaking and lapses of behaviour he was regarded as a larrikin.
Symonds should have played in more than 26 Test matches. He was unlucky to be at his peak in a particularly strong era for Australian cricket and to be compartmentalised as a limited-overs cricketer because he could hit the ball so far and score so quickly.
He was only 20 when he struck 16 sixes in an innings for Gloucestershire against Glamorgan on the small ground at Abergavenny in 1995, a record in county cricket until Ben Stokes, the new England captain, broke it this month.
Andrew Symonds was playing in England because he had been born in Birmingham, of West Indian and Scandinavian parentage, on June 9 1975. He was adopted, and when he was three months old he emigrated to Australia with his foster parents, Ken and Barbara Symonds.
He was educated at All Saints Anglican School in Queensland and initially did not commit to a future with either Australia or England – or West Indies, for that matter – yet in character, outlook and love of the outdoors he was suited to remaining in the southern hemisphere.
He turned down going on an England A tour but was not chosen to play in one-day cricket by Australia until 1998. He was not selected for their Test side until 2004 – and was dropped twice after leaving little impression in series against Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Indeed, he did not make an impact in one-day cricket until the 2003 World Cup, which he never expected to play in, when he struck an unbeaten 143 off 125 balls against Pakistan. He finished the tournament with a winner’s medal, as he did four years later.
Symonds was chosen for the Test series against England in 2006-07 and was to play the most significant innings of his career when he made 156 at Melbourne. Australia regained the Ashes, and he was to have his most successful period in Test cricket the following year when he contributed 777 runs in nine Tests against Sri Lanka, India and West Indies, including an unbeaten 162 at Sydney.
This match, however, became best known for a less edifying reason. Symonds became enmeshed in a row with Harbhajan Singh, the Indian spinner, who allegedly called him “a monkey”. Symonds felt he did not have the support of Cricket Australia, who, he thought, were more concerned with ensuring that the series continued. He was admonished for causing a stir and began drinking heavily. “From that moment was my downhill slide,” he recalled.
Symonds had long courted controversy. He was dropped for a one-day match in 2005 for being drunk; he had a fall-out with Ed Smith, a future chairman of England’s selectors, when playing for another county, Kent (he also represented Lancashire and Surrey). He was reprimanded for describing Brendon Mccullum of New Zealand, now England’s coach, as “a lump of s--t”, and was said to have turned up barefoot and wearing a cowboy hat for a contract meeting with Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of Cricket Australia.
Finally, in 2009 he was sent home from the T20 World Cup in England following an “alcohol-related incident”, and was dropped by Australia for good. His one-day average for Australia, 39.75, from 5,088 runs in 198 appearances, was markedly similar to his Test average, 40.61 (from 1,462 runs).
Symonds was happiest away from the crowds, fishing with his friend and teammate Matthew Hayden – their boat once sank in shark-infested waters – or in the bush in Queensland. Indeed, he once skipped a team meeting to go on a fishing trip. A keen rugby player, he once flattened a streaker at Brisbane.
Towards the end of his career his abilities drew him to the Indian Premier League and he became a celebrity on the sub-continent, appearing in a Bollywood film.
Andrew Symonds was divorced from his first wife, Brooke. He is survived by his second wife, Laura, and by their daughter and son.