Andrew Symonds has revealed his pain at the breakdown of his friendship with former Australian teammate Michael Clarke.
Clarke first lifted the lid on the feud that split the pair apart in his autobiography, detailing their falling out when Symonds was sent home from a one-day series against Bangladesh in Darwin in 2008 after going fishing instead of attending a team meeting.
"Some former teammates will take his side, and feed his conviction that I let him down and put ambition ahead of mateship," Clarke wrote in My Story.
"I would say that he let me down too – that if he had understood mateship as a two-way street, he would have seen that I had to do what was right for the whole team."
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But, according to Symonds, his resentment towards Clarke stretches back further to an incident where the all-rounder threw a drink on him.
While Clarke referenced the event in his autobiography, Symonds never told his side of the story. Until now.
“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 earlier this month.
“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.”
Symonds accepted his role in the bitter dispute and admitted things went sour over time.
“When he (Clarke) first came into the side I took him up north and went fishing and chasing pigs and riding motorbikes and all these sorts of things to give him an experience which he’d never had and he really enjoyed it,” Symonds said.
“I enjoyed taking him and seeing him in that environment was at times very humorous. We had a lot of fun.
“It’s something that probably happened over time, we grew apart for a number of reasons.
“We grew apart for the wrong reasons and I’ll accept responsibility for the most part of that. Some of the things I did were probably out of line.
“Then things broke down for whatever reason, it’s just the way it ended up.”
Clarke described the breakdown as one of the hardest things he has ever had to deal with.
"Ever since Warney's retirement in 2007, Symmo has been my best friend in the Australian team and my favourite cricketer to play with," Clarke wrote.
"After he is sent home from Darwin, I try to catch up with him and make amends and rebuild the friendship. I continue this effort on and off for years and we play together again, but it's never the same.
"When I become captain, I will be determined to do things a better way. It will cost me other friendships. None will leave as much pain as the one I lost with Andrew Symonds."
