It turns out sportsmen don’t have nine lives, and Andrew Symonds will now find this out. He is a talented, physical cricketer with a chronic behavioural problem. The incidents on their own are hardly Mike Tyson proportions but the repetition of these incidents are full moon rather than blue moon.
The bad boys of cricket, with exception of the match-fixers, have often been forgiven, the likes of Botham, Flintoff and Warne. There was one however who was thrown into cricket obscurity, the epically talented Vinod Kambli. He too had a problem with authority, he’d turn up to training late and drunk, and be seen at night clubs the day before a game.
What makes a sportsmen throw it all away? Most can’t handle the fame and money at a young age, which is a valid reason for Vinod Kambli. He was very young when he shot to fame and he had the added pressure of always being compared to the little master Tendulkar. You wouldn’t say the same for Andrew Symonds though, his time in the Australian side came in his 20s not in his teens, and it was a slow rise to fame.
Most sportsmen have a high level of focus to get to the highest level of their sport, is it too much to ask for this focus to be held up throughout a career? You’d expect some to lose it once in a while, and you’d expect a select few to lose it regularly.
I think it is fair that if you’ve given the individual the support and chances to change then you can allow yourself to give up on them. Andrew Symonds has had the chances, but has he had the support? I’d argue that he was not given enough support by the Australian Cricket Board over the ‘Bollyline’ controversy and since then he has received a lot of money from the IPL, and has therefore had more means and reasons to just let his focus go.
