Who will speak for Andrew Symonds?

My guess is that Andrew Symonds is perfectly capable of talking for himself. In a sporting universe, such as the one we currently inhabit, where the spoken word is impoverished, feared and censored into a meaningless gruel, he is a beacon of intelligible, honest communication.

I would give my back teeth to know what sense he makes of the bewildering moral outrage that has accompanied his every mis-step. Trouble is, we are not likely to find out any time soon. Being what it is, Cricket Australia has no doubt instructed Symonds to say as little as possible so long as he is an actual or potential international cricketer.

For the moment, then, others might be forgiven for presuming to speak on his behalf.

First, a little history. Famous sports people have been heroes for a long time. The earliest photographs and film footage of elite sport shows crowds, old and young, delirious with excitement. That the deeds of a talented athlete might lift the spirits, or at least serve up some healthy escapism, is not new.

What is new is the idea of sports people as “role models”. The sporting role model - someone whom children might “model” themselves on - was born at the same time as sports began to corporatise themselves. This happened because athletes and sponsors realised, simultaneously, that a sportsperson’s face could be worth a lot of money; put it on a cereal box or a can of deodorant and the product was likely to sell in greater numbers than without it.

Of course, sports fans have always been uncomfortable with the sense that their favourite team or player was just another money making enterprise. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the 20th century sports fan could tolerate anything except the discomforting thought that modern sport is primarily a form of prosaic commerce.

And so it was, in the second half of the 20th century players and sponsors went to greater and greater lengths to convince us that professional sport was still worthy of our affections. They did this through PR spin and by inventing the sporting role model; a person we could still love despite the fact that they were taking home an inordinate amount of our money.

It was no longer enough for them to be good at what they did; sports people had to be nice people as well. Of course, their niceness had to be proved and this meant using an utterly compliant sports media to get this lucrative new message across.

Let me be clear. Bradman was a hero, not a “role model”. Nobody cared much whether he visited sick children in hospitals or was kind to his wife. Miller, Cuthbert, Messenger, Dyer; heroes all but never “role models”.

So, there developed a perfectly proportional and symbiotic relationship between sporting money and sporting role models. Every extra dollar that flowed into sport in the last 50 years raised the importance of the sporting “role model”, not because children modelled their lives on sports people. They don’t. Never have. No, the role model’s “role” has been to act as crucial PR for an industry that has simply never wanted to be seen as an industry.

The sporting world that Andrew Symonds inhabits is so commercialised that the sporting role model is no longer the exceptional individual, he/she is now the rule. Apparently all sports people, not just the very best, have to be role models. This is sanctimonious rubbish.

What is so startling about the Symonds saga is how little he had to do to be so reviled and ridiculed. There will come a time when the idea of constant meetings for elite sporting teams will be seen for the pompous waste of time they are. So Symonds missed one to go fishing. Three cheers him, I say, and a big raspberry to Michael Clarke who chastised Symonds in public, sounding and looking like nothing so much as a private school head-prefect.

And what of his latest sins? Gideon Haigh, not noted for his sense of humour, argued this week that it was a disgrace that Symonds was not immediately suspended from playing cricket. For what? A few inelegant words and suddenly the Australian cricketing community has an axe-murderer on its hands?

Ever the optimist, I had hoped that the reason for such a “light” penalty was that Cricket Australia could see what a passing shower in a tea cup this whole episode has been and that a fine was their way of appeasing the wowsers and chronically up-tight. No such luck. In recent days we learn that Symonds’ sins are apparently so egregious that he will not be considered for the upcoming tour of South Africa.

For me, even the original $4,000 fine seemed an outrageous imposition for a couple of bawdy quips on live radio. But just like the North Melbourne football player who recently received a four-match suspension for speeding, Symonds is the utterly innocent victim of a sporting culture as puritan as anything Salem in the 1690s could manage.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Symonds’ non-selection has produced a series of priceless quotes from Animal Farm’s (read Cricket Australia’s) all-walking, all-talking chief executive, James Sutherland. Sutherland assures us that Symonds is receiving re-education - he calls it “intense counselling” - and that Symonds “is making good progress”. His omission from the Australian team is, according to Sutherland, “a chance to work through his issues and to make sure that he has the right platform to come back to international cricket”.

“Progress”? “Issues”? “Platform”? Am I the only one who hears Mao and Little Red Books in all this?

Sutherland and Symonds’ many detractors would do well to remember that it was Andrew Symonds’ old, un-reconstructed “platform” that got him into the Australian cricket team in the first place. Cricket Australia’s efforts to get Symonds’ head right have nothing to do with his ability to play cricket and everything to do with its conservative corporate sponsors not wanting their precious brands sullied by bad press. Sutherland says that not taking Symonds to South Africa is “the right decision for Andrew Symonds and the right decision for Australian cricket”. This is not a cricket matter; it is about image and brand.

During his interview with Roy and HG, Symonds said that sports people should basically shut-up. I couldn’t agree more. I pine for the days when athletes did their thing and just disappeared. I don’t want to love them or hate them or listen to their views on, well, anything really. I just want to watch them.

Until that happens, perhaps we should just hand athletes scripts before every interview. Or employ actors. Either way, let us try to remember that Andrew Symonds is merely a cricketer and dispense with the ugly charade that sports people need to be nice people simply because their corporate masters say that they must be.