Chappell is dead against recalling Symonds back in the Australian side and feels if selected the troubled all-rounder will be a huge distraction for the national team.
Former Australian captain Ian Chappell is dead against recalling Andrew Symonds back in the Australian side and feels if selected the troubled all-rounder will be a huge distraction for the national team which is already passing through a crisis in recent times.
Chappell said Symonds’ drinking problem was responsible for his frequent off-field misadventures, the latest being a detrimental public comment “lump of s-t” jibe directed towards New Zealand wicketkeeper batsman Brendon McCullum.
“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 was quoted as saying on Adelaide’s FiveAA radio station on Tuesday.
“They’ve got enough distractions with players struggling for form, without outside distractions. 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 counselling, but... I certainly haven’t heard anything public from Andrew saying, ‘look I have a bit of a problem here’.
“He keeps putting himself in the position like he did in the pub in Brisbane, and then in that position the other day when he’s interviewed when he’s had a few drinks, it sounds to me that he hasn’t made that admission even to himself that he’s got a problem,” he added.
Chappell also appreciated Ricky Ponting for coming out of similar drinking problem few years back after publicly admitting his addiction.
“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, I thought it was quite a smart thing to do because he put the onus on himself. If he didn’t fix the problem, there were going to be a few million people who knew that he hadn’t fixed the problem,” he said.
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