“Seconds later, as if in answer to my thoughts, a suicide bomber detonated himself among those we had just passed …” Benjamin Gilmour writes from Peshawar.
Symonds and booze: Cricket Australia’s double standards
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Andrew Symonds has an alcohol problem. So does Cricket Australia. Andrew Symonds has been forced to make public acknowledgement of his, and now to pay a massive price. Cricket Australia is still in denial. Time was when Symonds thought seriously about giving cricket away in favour of rugby league. He evidently made the wrong call. Had he defected to the Brisbane Broncos, as he fantasised of doing, sneaking out of a team hotel to have a few beers while watching the State of Origin, as he is meant to have done in London, would then have been a compulsory rite of passage, not the subject of mandatory punishment; indeed, had there not been a gang bang involved, he would probably have been regarded as an underachiever. Whatever the case, there do seem two extraordinarily different codes of behaviour involved: League has made the blind eye as much a feature of the game as the grapple tackle, while cricket appears to have imbibed Mencken’s famous definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves”. There’s a third standard involved too. Twenty years ago, David Boon, now a Test selector, staggered off an airliner at Heathrow the worse for a record number of beers consumed en route from Australia — a record that he has parlayed into a healthy post-retirement career, and which has for years been celebrated by one of Cricket Australia’s major sponsors. Cricket Australia, then, has more than a nodding acquaintance with the irresponsible drinking for which it has convicted Symonds. In hindsight, it appears obvious that Symonds should never have been picked: his behaviour smacks of a player who wasn’t quite sure how much he wanted to be in England in the first place, who wasn’t comfortable about his place in the team having been excluded from the Ashes squad, who had come from the big money and VIP treatment of the Indian Premier League, missed his old mucka Matthew Hayden and found accounting for his whereabouts every moment of the day to be inhibiting, and maybe even a little demeaning. If you’re trying to resist the enticements of alcohol, it’s such pressure situations where willpower is most routinely found wanting. While Symonds confuses easily, furthermore, here he has some right to be so. For the last year he has been undergoing a “rehabilitation” process described in the woolliest terms of therapeutic ideology, the creepy, infantilising tyranny of the twelve-step programme. Now, having been pardoned and excused for more significant misdemeanours, he finds himself in a zero-tolerance environment and punished for a trifle. Why? Because, Ricky Ponting explains, impressionable young teammates might have their heads turned. But if that’s the case, then what does that say of Ponting, who after leading Australia in 56 Tests and 184 one-day internationals is still so unsure of his own authority? Was the environment really so risky, so fraught? Perhaps Symonds has more faith in the common sense of his comrades than his captain. The counterargument is that Symonds has been penalised not for falling off the wagon, but for deviating from the straight and narrow path set him by Cricket Australia and the team “leadership group” — that peculiar oxymoron. But how realistic were those expectations, and how proportionate is the penalty? And while personally I think James Sutherland is a better man than this, some will also see CA’s as an opportunistic punishment, meted out because Symonds has so forfeited public popularity that he can easily be made an example of. Whatever the case, Symonds would be justified in reflecting on the example set by his newly punitive employer. Many people in this country drink to excess rather too often. This is sometimes because they are helpless to do otherwise, but also because advertising, by associating itself with the positive reputation of sport, has successfully reinforced the idea that alcohol is integral to any good time in the making. CA certainly loves a drop. CUB is doubly represented in its sponsorship portfolio: its number one beer brand VB, with its now rather tired vaunting of Boony, Beefy and Warnie, is a Platinum Partner; its number one wine brand, Wolf Blass, is a Gold Partner. Diageo is also a Gold Partner in the brand name of Johnnie Walker; Asahi Breweries is an Official Supplier as the owner of Schweppes. Andrew Symonds’ sin lies partly in his evincing why the makers of alcoholic beverages so love their sport, the hankering to watch State of Origin and the itch for a beer having in his mind acquired reflex connection. In the mid-1980s, an earlier cricket maverick in Greg Matthews was penalised for publicly disavowing tobacco, thereby offending Australian cricket’s then sponsor Benson & Hedges. One wonders how CUB will feel about the message from CA that drinking while watching sport can actually destroy your career.
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11 Comments
If you’re serious about this CA, give up your alcohol sponsorships. Else leave Symonds alone.
I have a few problems with the arguments listed in this article.
1. Can’t compare generations. Things that occured in less enlightened times have no place in the modern world. Boonie drinking his way to England in the 80’s cannot be compared to Symonds boozing on in today’s times. You might as well compare the “White Australia policy” to today’s open immigration policy. Culture changes.
2. The argument that as CA accepts the dollars from alcohol companies, there is a double standard in expecting its players not to drink is also ingenuous. CA is Andrew Symonds employer, not sponser. CA has a right (and responsibilty) to ask its players to adhere to a code of conduct.
3. As part of a team, you have to adhere to team rules. Part of the deal. No one is bigger than the team. You may not like the rules, but once they are signed off by the team leaders, that’s it. The reason Andrew is going home is not because he had a drink, but because he turned his back on the team.
Bad new for England this - Symonds’ capers could have nicely undermined the Australian team this (northern) summer. There’s still the possibility of the Lara Bingle angle, however. Not that I’m clutching at straws or anything.
Clearly Scott thinks these are more enlightened times, oh and spare us the sanctimonious tones and team rah rah crud. When CA stops taking money from alcohol companies who use the success of the australian cricket team to peddle their drugs to the wider community, then and only then will they be entitled to sack a player for abusing the very drug they represent.
Andrew is a stat, just like the rest of the country who has an alcohol problem and I will miss him in a team of otherwise squeaky clean clones.
Really….. I think we all need to lay off Roy and ask the real question….. where the hell were his fellow team mates!! How come the other cane toads and cockroaches within the Aussie cricket team (Watson, Haddin, Clarke, Clark, Lee, Warner, Hauritz etc) weren’t out with him cheering on their respective team and enjoying an ale or two????? Fair dinkum…. its state of origin - hang your heads in shame boys!
CJ
I’m not the only one who watches cricket only when Symonda is playing - the rules make fools of the board.
SCOTT - Are you serious? While David Boon may have over indulged once on a plane, the whole emphasis re alcohol these days is much worse than years ago - and it’s being started much younger too! Just talk to highly qualified medical people, who spend their night shifts, holding the hand of some young idiot who’s either vomiting or abusing them, and having to put up with their drunken mates - male and female! That’s the ‘club’ these days, and the rules are to just drink until you fall down - drunk or dead! I don’t hear Cricket Australia adding their voices to the medical profession or the police, by ceasing their relationship with leading alcohol manufacturers and peddlers. They don’t even stipulate, that ads shown while cricket is being played should carry responsible messages!
When sporting bodies, all of them, start facing up to their community obligations, they’ll stop this hypocritical attitude re alcohol. When teams win, they spray each other with the brand that the sponsors stipulate. If it wasn’t such a disgrace, it would be funny! Alcoholism is an illness, and should be treated as such. I thought the days had gone where we treated this illness as a weakness and the alcoholic as a criminal. Cricket Australia has just shown itself to be like too many authoritarian bodies, a bunch of hypocrites! Do as I say, not as I do!
Who cares?
Call me a pedant but I’m not sure why “leadership group” is an oxymoron. It’s a group of leaders. The senior members of the team. The captain and the first and second mates, for example.
I’ve got to say, the thing that most struck me about the team media conference was the blatant hypocracy of all the po-faced guys lamenting AS’s downfall shaded by their VB caps. A bit too post-modern.
If Symonds has an agreement with CA that covers his behaviour, then we all should grin and bear it. He has committed a minor breach, according to the article, but that is opinion only. Given his history, Symonds was bound to suffer harsh punishment. Either way, he was already in the twilight of his international career. Lets concentrate on the cricket.