OF ALL those who have come into the Australian side since the Ashes defeat of 2005, Andrew Symonds may prove to be the most significant. He not only lends strength to a bowling attack coming to terms with the loss of Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, he epitomises the spirit in which Australia intend to play the game through to the 2009 Ashes and beyond. That is not necessarily a compliment.

Little more than a year ago, Symonds’s Test career looked to have stalled. Australia knew they needed to find somebody to bat at No 6 who could bolster the bowling, but they thought Shane Watson was their man, not Symonds, who had been briefly tried without success.

Then Watson got injured, again, Damien Martyn retired, and a vacancy arose. Within two matches, Symonds had cemented his place with a match-turning century against England at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. In Sydney last week he produced another crisis-averting hundred, albeit with a couple of slices of luck.

Symonds, who was restricted to seven overs in India’s first innings by an ankle injury, not only satisfies Australia’s need for an allrounder. He also holds out the promise of being the man who can bat with the tail once Adam Gilchrist has gone. This he did in exemplary fashion in Sydney when he oversaw the addition of 329 runs for the last four wickets. Symonds once said that in his early days he went out to bat without a “map”, but he has shown enough times that he knows how to construct an innings.

Batting with the tail was a role that Steve Waugh used to perform with great intelligence, and there is more of the young Waugh in Symonds’s habit of getting in the hair of the opposition. Whatever the full story behind the spat with Harbhajan Singh on Friday, the incident suggested that Symonds has not stopped spoiling for a fight.

In the past he has crossed swords with Kevin Pietersen as well as Harbhajan and Sri Sreesanth during a one-day series in India, when he was, according to the Australian camp, racially taunted by crowds in Baroda and Bombay. He even fell out with one of his captains, Ed Smith, during a stint at Kent.

Known for their sledging, Australia occasionally talk of cleaning up their act, yet they unerringly revert to their worst ways when a game is on the line, as it was when Harbhajan was batting with Sachin Tendulkar in Sydney.

In such situations, Australia will push officialdom to the limit in their desperation to gain an advantage. But the Indians know, as do England from 2005, the value of invading Australia’s “space”; of sometimes bullying the bullies. When they stand accused, as they were by Graeme Smith, of gross verbal abuse, or of not “walking”, Australia also talk about keeping things on the field, or of taking the rough with the smooth, but they don’t always observe this principle.

Ricky Ponting, the captain, who lodged a complaint of racial abuse against Harbhajan, is among the worst culprits in this regard. At Trent Bridge in 2005 he lost his temper over England’s use of substitute fielders, as though Gary Pratt himself had called him through for the suicidal single that cost him his wicket.

In this Test, Ponting hit the cover off the ball down the leg side and was given not out, but still showed his displeasure when he was later given leg-before off an inside edge. Mike Hussey and Michael Clarke, whom Ponting has identified as leaders of Australia’s next generation, are cut from the same cloth. Yesterday, after plainly edging his first ball to slip, Clarke stood his ground.

Similarly, Symonds may be admired for his athletic fielding and six-hitting – he is the Twenty20 cricketer par excellence – but that does not necessarily mean Australians have taken him to their hearts, and not only because he is not a true-blue Aussie, having been born in England before emigrating as a child.

For all the larrikin image of their nation, the deep conservatism of many Australians left them embarrassed by the stories of Symonds’s drinking on the 2005 tour of England, culminating in his allnight session in Cardiff that meant he was incapable of playing against Bangladesh. Had he played, Australia might have avoided a humiliating defeat that played its part in throwing out of kilter a team that thrives on winning momentum.

Though they expect nothing else, nor would Australians have been comfortable to see Symonds stand his ground when caught behind during his unbeaten 162 in Sydney, or when he was later reprieved after Bruce Oxenford, the TV umpire who hails from Symonds’s state of Queensland, gave him not out when his foot was plainly off the ground as India appealed for a stumping. Australians have always loved Australia first and their sportsmen second. This Australia side could win 30 Test matches in a row and not necessarily command the affection of the people. The public knows them as opportunists first and foremost.

Everyone knows that when Symonds, 32, played county cricket as a young man in the mid1990s – after being asked to pledge his future to English cricket – he was not being entirely truthful. In coming out later in favour of a future with Australia, his confession that he had always been a “fair dinkum Aussie” would have left uneasy those of his countrymen who aspired to straighter behaviour.

To be fair to Symonds, he took the harder road in opting to try to play Test cricket for Australia rather than England, and, after many years of effort, has finally made the big time. Geraint Jones and Tim Ambrose, who went to England after him to try their luck in similar fashion, may be regarded as having taken the easier route.