Symonds Urged to Admit Drinking Problem at Cricket Australia Hearing

Australia's roistering all-rounder Andrew Symonds is facing increasing pressure to state publicly that he has a drink problem in an attempt to rehabilitate his career in time for next summer's Ashes series in England.

Ricky Ponting, his captain, is lobbying for Symonds to be included in Australia's party to tour South Africa next month but that may happen only if Symonds openly states he intends to curb his drinking.

A fine up to a maximum of A$5,750 (£2,700) seems an inevitable outcome for Symonds at a Cricket Australia hearing in Melbourne tomorrow which will rule on a charge of detrimental public comment after he called New Zealand's Brendon McCullum a "lump of shit" on a Queensland radio station in disgust at McCullum's controversial short-term signing for New South Wales.

But the most important conversations could well go on behind the scenes as Cricket Australia comes to the realisation that Symonds's unprofessional behaviour risks making Australian cricket a laughing stock.

Symonds's conversation on the commercial station Triple M was the latest episode in a trouble-strewn season in which he was dropped from the Australia side for missing training, shoulder-charged a streaker while batting and had a slanging match in a Brisbane pub.

He was also at the center of a race row a year ago with the Indian spin bowler, Harbhajan Singh, who was eventually cleared of allegations he had called Symonds "a monkey" during the Sydney Test.

Cricket Australia has said Symonds cannot be banned as this was, officially, his first offence.

Ian Chappell, a former Australia captain and now a TV commentator, has claimed Symonds would be a major distraction if he returned with his problems unresolved to a struggling Australia side, which has been beaten in successive Test series against India and South Africa.

"It's fine for Ricky Ponting to be saying he'll take Andrew Symonds back but in the shape he's in at the moment he's going to be a hell of a distraction to the team," Chappell said. "You've got to face up to the fact you've got a problem before you can fix it. I don't know what's been going on with the counseling but I certainly haven't heard anything public from Andrew saying: 'Look, I have a bit of a problem here.'

"There were a lot of people who said they thought Ricky Ponting was silly to make his announcement public a few years ago when he said: 'I've got a drinking problem,' but I thought one, it was a pretty courageous thing to do, and two, it was quite a smart thing to do because he put the onus on himself."

Symonds's most notorious drinking bout came in a Cardiff pub crawl in 2005. He relates in his autobiography, Roy: Going For Broke, that he returned home at sunrise before a one-day match against Bangladesh and was dropped by his coach, John Buchanan, who realized on the team bus going to the ground that he had been drinking.

Symonds's psychologist, Deirdre Anderson, who helped the great Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe cope with retirement, said that, if Cricket Australia supported Symonds, it could anticipate more outstanding performances from "a good cricketer and a good man".

Symonds was sent home from Australia's training camp in Darwin last August when he missed a team meeting to go fishing. He called it a "wake-up call" but then slept through a net session. He then had an altercation with a fan in a Brisbane bar but insisted that, although he would make "better decisions" in future, he would not give up drinking and socializing.

Symonds's discontent over McCullum arose from New South Wales's decision to field him in a Twenty20 final against Victoria last week, so making him eligible for the money-spinning Champions League – the world club competition – in India later this year.

McCullum has taken his sledge graciously. "International cricket is better for his involvement," McCullum said. "He is entitled to his opinions. This was obviously a strong one." The verdict of Justice Gordon Lewis, a retired judge, is unlikely to be so forgiving.