Tuesday, April 23, 2002 Of all the batsmen who tantalise and confound, perhaps the most perplexing are the brilliant ones who never quite make it. What turns Mark Ramprakash from a run-shark into a jellyfish? Why did David Hookes manage only one Test century? Where exactly is Vinod Kambli? And how long before some cluey university offers a postgraduate course on Graeme Hick: What The Hell Was That All About?

Not so much as a minor thesis has tackled the mystery of Andrew Symonds. Neither the Birmingham Post, in the English city where he was born, nor the Gold Coast Bulletin, on the patch of Queensland dirt where he grew up, has ever mounted a searching investigation. It seems a puzzling oversight because, of all the gifted Australians never to play a Test match, the case of Symonds is one of the more curious.

Far from playing in a Test, Symonds has never even been 12th or 13th man. He has never been picked for an Ashes trip; never, in fact, been picked for a Test tour of any description. In another age Symonds might have been one of the big top's star attractions, a darling of the masses, a fire-breathing lion-tamer whom the ladies adored and the gentlemen admired. Today he is an almost obsolete figure. Little is expected of him and nothing more than a minuscule footnote in history beckons.

That footnote will tell the tale of Glamorgan v Gloucestershire, August 1995. Symonds pummelled 20 sixes in that game, smashing one of cricket's more unsmashable records - the previous best of 17 sixes had stood for 36 years - and signalling the arrival of a laid-back bloke who was not your average 20-year-old.

Yet, even then, anti-climax awaited. No sooner had his 16th six, a world record for one innings, sailed over the Abergavenny outfield and into a nearby tennis court, then Symonds was telling onlookers it was no big deal. All that mattered was that he had done well for his team. His reaction mirrored that of the Australian papers back home, where county cricket is considered less relevant than underwater tiddlywinks and where Symonds's 20 sixes merited 20 words in the sports-in-brief columns.

It was no big deal either when, a short while later, he was picked for an England A tour to Pakistan. The captain was Nasser Hussain and, had Symonds made the trip, it is conceivable that he might these days be Hussain's right-hand man. He bats, after all, like a street-smart Andrew Flintoff, with more power than Flintoff but less vulnerability against the new ball. Had he become an Englishman, Symonds might have played 50 Tests by now and scored eight or nine centuries. He might boast an average of around 40. England might have made, say, a World Cup semi-final, and they would surely have won a Test at the Gabba, where Symonds's record over the past three seasons reads 1,075 first-class runs at 63.

But Symonds did what Craig White, Jason Gallian, Martin McCague and the Hollioakes didn't do - he turned his back on saggy England and went after a baggy green. It was an admirable quest but a doomed one. To win a baggy green a batsman must robotically pile up run after run, year after year; and Symonds has never been that kind of player. Alternatively he must, like Adam Gilchrist, learn a second string; and Symonds's offies and brisk mediums have never been that menacing.

The Gilchrist example is a telling one. If it was not for his glovework Gilchrist might never have cracked the Test side, Australia might never have won five matches - let alone 16 - in a row, and South Africa would in all likelihood be the No. 1 team in the world. It makes you wonder what Australia have missed out on by never giving Symonds a run.

This may seem a bit fanciful. We are talking, after all, about a man who has played 48 one-day internationals and, with two fifties and an average of 25, barely made a dent on any of them. Yet Symonds has suffered more than most from being typecast as the bits-and-pieces biffer who bats at seven and never gets to play himself in. It's a cliché but it's true: on the eight occasions he has batted in the first four for Australia he has swiped 284 runs at an average of 40 and a strike-rate of 104. He has opened only once, against Zimbabwe, thrashing 60 off 47 balls.

He could have developed into a slightly less cultured Viv Richards. He might have become a right-handed Sanath Jayasuriya. He has never been given the chance.

Last summer, it looked like that chance would never come. Dropped by Australia after another ineffectual one-day outing, he gave the selectors an earful and then proceeded to look bored stiff throughout a mid-season drought for Queensland. But this is a story that might yet have a happy ending. Symonds finished the Australian summer with a man-of-the-match 91 and six wickets in the Pura Cup final. He has started the English summer with a sturdy 89 for Kent.

Best of all, he is still only 26. He should be a certainty for the World Cup and, when Australia's Test selectors ponder life after the Waughs, they could do worse than opt for an electrifying middle-order of Lehmann, Symonds, Gilchrist.

There is about as much chance of that happening as there is of Gilbert Jessop rising from the dead to become MCC president. But it would be some spectacle. Swinging his bat like a meat hook, Symonds is the latest in a distinguished line of mighty Australian ball-hitters - from George Bonnor to Jack Lyons to Albert Trott - which began more than a century ago and then skipped a few generations. Given the chance, Symonds would get shoes shuffling through turnstiles and toes stomping. For that, he deserves to be more than a footnote.

Chris Ryan is a former managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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