So Andrew Symonds, the Australian cricketer best known (aside from his skills with a bat and ball) for sporting rather dirty looking dreads and white lipstick, has been sent home from the UK in disgrace.
You have to wonder, when you look at this picture, whether he would have even made it through British customs without a full cavity search, without his cricketing credentials to back him up. He looks to me just the sort of shifty and somewhat arrogant person customs officials would be tripping over each other to inflict some of their ‘I’m having a bad day’ power on.
So anyway. He was banished from Australia’s Twenty20 World Cup squad for an ‘alcohol-related incident’, or, if you take the back-peddling spin doctors eloquent phrasing out of the equation, for turning up for practise half cut.
Apparently he is ‘disappointed and understandably upset’ by what has happened. So he bloody well should be. Here’s a man who is paid large sums of money to play cricket and represent his country. If he can’t do either, because he chooses to drown his cornflakes in Jack Daniels, then he doesn’t deserve a place on the team in the first place.
After all the other stunts he has pulled in recent years, being sent packing with his tail between his legs couldn’t have come a moment to soon for Australian cricket.
During the 2005 Ashes tour he showed up drunk for a one-day game, and was threatened with the sack – an incident that obviously didn’t teach him the error of his ways. He has had to receive counseling after ‘a string of behavioural incidents’, which also led to him being banned from selection for the tour of South Africa. He called New Zealander Brendon McCullum a “lump of s***” on radio, and was fined $4,000 for his troubles.
Last year he was expelled from the team because he went off on a fishing jolly instead of attending a compulsory team meeting, and in November he got into an ‘altercation’ with a patron at a Brisbane hotel.
For crying out loud, he already gets to play a game everyday that he obviously loves, and is paid incredibly well to do so. How many more chances should he get? He can hardly use his job as an excuse for the drinking and bad behaviour. Yes, cricket at this level must be stressful, but this isn’t a reason to act like a complete and utter w*nker. Shouldn’t he be grateful to have the talent to do what he does in the first place, instead of insisting on peeing it up against the nearest wall.
Why are so many sports ‘stars’ allowed to become so much more important than the game itself? Why do they think they can act this way without facing any consequences? He should be permanently booted off the team to make room for someone else who really cares about the game they play.
If a politician started using public money to fund their housing… oh hang on a minute, that might not be the best example to give… If a doctor kept turning up to work drunk, and beat up every patient he didn’t like the look of, he’d be kicked out of the hopsital before his stethoscope had time to even hit the ground. Now granted a doctors job description may he slightly different to Symonds, but only so far as a doctor saves lives and actually makes a real difference in the world.
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