At the time of his tragic death on Saturday, Andrew Symonds still carried scars from an ugly fallout with Cricket Australia that prematurely ended his playing career.
Symonds was seemingly at the peak of his powers in 2008, starting to dominate in the Test arena in the same way he had in ODI cricket for years.
The all-rounder was already a dual World Cup winner and one of the most gifted, entertaining players in the game.
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He could truly do it all; dominate with the bat, bowl seam, spin, and field like few in the game ever have.
Long-form dominance was the last piece to fall into place — but it well and truly had by the time Australia played India at the SCG in January 2008.
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Having made a solid start to the summer with the bat, Symonds reached another level when he made 162 not out in the first innings of the second Test. It was his highest ever score in any international format.
Symonds followed that act with 61 in Australia’s second innings, and claimed 3-51 in the fourth innings as the hosts clinched a 122-run win.
To think that Test would ultimately prove to be the turning point in Symonds’ glittering career would have been impossible to fathom at the time.
The Test, however, was marred by accusations of racism against Symonds, who would go on to feel betrayed by the organisation that was meant to protect him.
In the midst of a 129-run stand with Sachin Tendulkar, polarising Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh exchanged words with Symonds that landed himself in front of the match referee.
Symonds said Harbhajan called him a “monkey”, which he was also accused of doing during an ODI prior to the Test series.
Harbhajan insisted he was misheard and was actually directing a vulgar Hindi slur at Symonds.
It was an explanation that didn’t pass muster at the time, and Harbhajan was punished with a three-Test ban.
What followed would prove to trigger the end sequence for Symonds’ playing days, which came to a close just over a year later.
Harbhajan’s ban was overturned after the Board of Control for Cricket in India threatened to fly its players home.
Faced with the prospect of losing millions of dollars due to an abandoned tour, CA went into a panic and was later accused of caving into pressure from the BCCI.
The former all-rounder would go on to lose all trust in the governing body.
“I suppose this would be the moment where my whole persona to cricket changed. I didn’t realise the politics, the power, the money until this moment in my career,” Symonds said in a 2018 Fox Cricket documentary on the incident, known today as ‘Monkeygate’.
“I didn’t realise how powerful one player, one incident, how much money was at stake and the ramifications.”
‘DOWNHILL FAST’
The racism allegations led to weeks of chaos in the game, while Symonds’ close friends and teammates Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden, Michael Clarke and Ricky Ponting were dragged into the storm as witnesses.
Harbhajan was eventually found guilty of using abusive language, but not racial abuse.
Symonds swiftly became disillusioned, feeling let down by the system and unsupported by CA.
But what weighed on him the most was the need for him to bring his friends into the mess.
“I went downhill pretty fast after this because I felt responsible for four of my mates, close mates, that I dragged into this whole situation and it beared very heavily on me,” he said.
“I started drinking way too much and my cricket, my mindset — I started to go downhill, I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind.”
Less than 12 months later, the exciting all-rounder was playing his last Test for Australia at just 33 years old, while his last ODI came soon after in May 2009.
It was a sharp and sudden decline for a player who had just delivered his best Test performance.
Symonds was sent into a downward spiral and increasingly moved himself towards the team’s outer.
Off-field misdemeanours soon began piling up with Symonds disciplined several times for alcohol related incidents.
“I went through a proper system where I was diagnosed with binge drinking. I had to see a counsellor for eight weeks … so I went through the proper process to make sure I was going to be OK,” Symonds said on an episode of Fox Sports’ Cricket Legends.
“It was taking its toll.”
One of the biggest blows to Symonds’ career came in August 2008 when he was dismissed from an ODI series against Bangladesh for missing a team meeting to go fishing.
He said there was a miscommunication with team staff after the meeting was moved from the afternoon to the morning at late notice.
‘OUR FRIENDSHIP WAS DESTROYED’
Making matters worse was that his one-time friend, Clarke, was standing in for Ponting as captain, and signed off on the disciplinary action.
Symonds said that his relationship with Clarke had already taken a turn after he netted a $1.8 million contract for the Deccan Chargers in the inaugural Indian Premier League in 2008.
“Money does funny things. It’s a good thing but it can be a poison and I reckon it may have poisoned our relationship,” he told the Brett Lee Podcast just last month.
In between Monkeygate and the missed teem meeting was a tour of the West Indies in which Symonds threw a drink on Clarke.
Speaking on Cricket Legends, Symonds said he was left furious after Clarke suggested he was selfish player and person.
“I threw a drink on him and what he said to me put me into a rage,” Symonds said. “What he said to me was nowhere near accurate and that immediate point is where he lost me and I lost him.
“Our friendship was destroyed in that moment.”
Clarke would then question Symonds’ commitment to Australia after missing the team meeting. He later claimed in his autobiography My Story that Symonds resented him for being chosen as interim captain.
The pair never patched things up when they still had the chance.
‘THE SYSTEM LET HIM DOWN’
The final straw for CA was when Symonds broke a clause in his contract that he could not drink before the T20 World Cup in England in 2009.
Symonds couldn’t resist when his beloved Queensland beat NSW in the first State of Origin match of that year.
He never played for Australia again.
For a long time, Symonds was painted as the misbehaving rogue of Australian cricket, but in the years that followed, it would become clear that all was not as it seemed.
CA’s general manager of cricket operations at the time, Michael Brown, admitted this week that Symonds was failed by the organisation, and was the true “victim” of the saga.
“I always believed him in Monkeygate. I always believed him. One thing he always was was true to himself,” Brown told Code Sports on Sunday. “I just think he got swallowed up in a disgraceful process. We botched it, we handled it really poorly.
“We played politics rather than protect the man. And it was all about saving face with India.
“The system let him down.”