Former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke has reflected on the “amazing memories” he shared with Andrew Symonds.
The cricket world is still in shock following the sudden death of Symonds at age 46. Symonds died in a car crash on Sunday.
Clarke said Symonds’ death was a “really tough” reminder of the dark times Australian cricket has recently endured, with icons Shane Warne and Rod Marsh passing away on the same day in March.
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“A tough couple of days for Andrew Symonds’ family and friends,” Clarke said on Sky Sports Radio’s The Big Sports Breakfast.
“Obviously extremely sad. Really tough. [I] just don’t know what is going on with cricket at the moment. Just devastating. It has been a horrible few months.
“These are the times you grab your family, friends and cherish every day.”
While Clarke and Symonds had a falling out later in their careers, the former Australian skipper chose to focus on the great friendship they struck when they first became teammates – a friendship that sparked out of vastly different upbringings.
“The laughing joke in our team was complete city boy me, complete country boy him and yet we built an amazing connection,” he said.
“We did things I never thought I would experience and wasn’t comfortable doing but with him, [he] made me comfortable.”
Clarke spoke on the pair’s outdoor adventures, including how Symonds made him step out of his “comfort zone” during a road trip from Sydney to Brisbane.
“I remember we did a Winnebago trip from Sydney to drive to Brisbane and flew up north to Esmeralda,” Clarke added.
“We had two weeks. My job as a city boy was to organise the city trip, the start in Sydney and where we were going to stop along the way to Brissy and then he organised the back half from Brisbane up to Esmeralda.
“Talk about out of your comfort zone, we were fishing for Barra on these banks where there were crocs everywhere and again, no way would I ever do that on my own but with him he just made you feel so comfortable. Some amazing memories.”
Clarke described Symonds as the greatest athlete he got to play with due to his “speed” and “power”, and the ability to take a screamer in the field.
“We just had a really good connection,” Clarke added.
“Some of the things we both enjoyed about batting [were] running between the wickets or even how competitive we were at fielding at training to try and improve our fielding, brought the best out of me.
“Very fortunate to have spent so much time with him on and off the field, to have played with him, probably the most athletic cricketer I played with. Absolute freak of an athlete — speed, power, watching him dive and take a catch, a great fielder as well.
“A lot of amazing memories and again, I said that about Warney not too long ago, in times like these and even (Phil) Hughesy now, you still think about them every day but I think that is the key — to remember all those good times and celebrate those.
“Yeah, there are days, feelings and moments that are extremely sad and it’s hard to believe, of all things a car accident as well, so hard to comprehend. But when you go through so many of those feelings, you’ve got to keep remembering the good times.”
While they grew close in their early years together in the Australian side, incidents over the years saw the Clarke-Symonds relationship fall apart.
Clarke, who was Australia’s stand-in captain during a one-day series against Bangladesh in Darwin in 2008, was part of the disciplinary meeting that elected to send Symonds home for missing a team meeting.
In the months prior to Symonds’ death, he revealed how he was sent into “rage” and threw a drink at Clarke after being labelled selfish during a tour in the West Indies.
“I threw a drink on him. He didn’t tell me to go to bed, he said something else but I threw a drink on him and what he said to me put me into a rage,” Symonds said on Fox Sports’ Cricket Legends.
“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.
“He’d said to me, not in these words, but he’d suggested I was a selfish player and a selfish person. The one thing I don’t consider myself to be is that and that really annoyed me.”
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