The great improbability of Andrew Symonds, Australian cricketer

The nickname of Andrew Symonds encapsulated the unlikelihood of an adopted boy from Birmingham playing for Australia.

Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden share a laugh after winning the 2007 World Cup

First published in 1954, Roy of the Rovers was an English comic strip cataloguing the exploits of the fictional footballer through an adventurous, colourful career, replete with cliffhangers and comebacks. That it was affixed as a nickname to Andrew Symonds, who has died aged 46, encapsulated his sheer improbability as an Australian cricketer.

Symonds was born in Birmingham to mixed race parents whom he never met, and adopted by an English couple who then emigrated to Australia, settling in Charters Towers – a Radacanu-esque heritage, almost before we had the vocabulary for it.

His father called him Roy, for his instant, intuitive and incurable addiction to sport of all kinds, and he could have played for either England or Australia, at cricket or league; when he had to make the choice in 1995, Symonds accepted that he was, at heart, a Queenslander, with a proportionate passion for Origin.

Symonds assuredly sounded like an Aussie: broad, laconic, salty, known when he played for Kent by the Waltzing Matilda ringtone that would ripple round the dressing room. But, with his partiality to dreadlocks and lip cream, he remained an exotic presence among the pale-faced, often blonde teammates of his time, with a flair that savoured of the Caribbean.

You sensed that, on the cricket field, Symonds always wanted to be involved. He could bat anywhere, bowl a bit of anything, and fill any position in the field, from slip to the boundary, in the box or in the ring.

A personal memory is of watching Symonds field in the covers in the Sydney Test in 2007 when Kevin Pietersen was batting, forming an impassable barrier as Pietersen smashed ball after ball. He went left; he went right; he stopped red-hot strokes without blinking, part of a game within the game.

It’s as a batter Symonds will principally be remembered. His record is disarmingly excellent: almost 7000 international runs, averaging 40 from 26 Tests and 198 one-day internationals, at a time when Australian places were never more contested. There were no great innovations, no trick shots. He was pure physical power, long levers and muscle mass. I never knew you could rupture a bicep until Symonds did in 2007.

Sometimes selectors did not seem quite sure what to do with Symonds – his versatility challenged them.

Sometimes Symonds himself appeared unsure of his role. That ambivalence was first dispelled, four years into his international career, at Wanderers in February 2003 when Symonds opened Australia’s World Cup campaign with 143 not out from 125 deliveries, turning a precarious four for 86 into an insurmountable eight for 310.

It was an innings of almost preternatural poise – not just powerful but organised, tactical and adroit, conserving wickets, concentrating on the fifth bowler, detonating at the end.

In Test cricket, that coming of age was postponed until the largest possible stage – the Boxing Day Test now remembered as the venue of Shane Warne’s 700th wicket.

The day after was all about Symonds, who again turned a problem into a platform, his 156 gradually transforming five for 84 into all out 419. He took 21 balls to get off the mark; his third fifty took 54 balls.

His century was one of those moments, before the cricketers’ leap was monetised, that require no replay, so clearly to they live in memory.

Having inched his way through the nineties with singles, Symonds went to three figures with a six off Paul Collingwood over long-on. Before it had even landed in the Members, Symonds had launched himself into the loving arms of his fellow Queenslander Matthew Hayden – perhaps the only man in the Australian team strong enough to catch him.

Andrew Symonds celebrates his first Test century with teammate Matthew Hayden at the MCG in 2007

It was a similar joy to watch Symonds hold court at the evening press conference. So, Roy, talk us through it then: what was your plan? “If he slips it up, then I’ll give it some Larry Dooley.” Good areas, Roy.

With his complicated heritage, race was perhaps always bound to have a complicated bearing on Symonds’ career.

He gained that initial World Cup opportunity because Darren Lehmann was serving a suspension for racial abuse; Symonds was himself targeted for racial abuse by crowds in India in 2007, and became the ambivalent central figure in Monkeygate, alternately aggrieved and bemused, and finally looking as if the whole business was too much for him.

Much as he loved cricket, he could also look like he would rather be almost anywhere else – generally hunting, which he relished, or fishing, for which he once skipped an Australian team meeting to his cost.

Alcohol was a problem, ironically at a time cricket was a billboard for alcohol advertising, and still celebrating its champion drinkers. Money, of which Symonds earned a good deal on the T20 circuit, also slipped through his fingers, notably in the collapse of Storm Financial.

But then, Symonds was neither a calculating nor a guarded man, which is actually what his teammates and friends cherished about him, and what the public warmed to in an increasingly manufactured and homogenised game.

It’s a little haunting that the two figures who so ignited that Boxing Day Test 15 years ago, Warne and Symonds, are now both gone.

After numerous reboots, Roy Race continues his involvement with the Rovers. In real life, none are indestructible.