In my time as a player with Kent, we were lucky enough to have some fantastic overseas players. I captained Muttiah Muralitharan and Steve Waugh, and played in the ranks alongside Aravinda de Silva, but in terms of the value he brought to the team, Andrew Symonds was the best of the lot.

He could win the game with bat, ball, or in the field. But above all, he could inspire the rest of the side with his passionate approach to the game. He was incredibly combative, the sort of bloke you were always glad to have on your side because other teams hated playing against him. There was an almost tribal feel to the desire he brought in trying to win a game.

At Kent, we knew that Symmo liked a beer, but his boozing never got seriously out of hand. He might have been out the night before a game a few times, but it never resulted in him turning up late or compromising his attitude on the field. And as captain, I suppose I would probably have been the last to know if he had been burning the midnight oil.

Take a one-day game against Lancashire at Tunbridge Wells, one Sunday in 2004. I learnt after the match that Symmo had overindulged on the Saturday night. But by the time I found that out, he had won the game on his own, hitting an astonishing 146 from 110 balls.

Symmo is essentially a simple soul, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Life in the public eye has never really suited him. If he could have his way, he would be at his happiest sleeping under the stars, bush knife at his side, ready to feed himself the next day by hunting wild boar. He is, in many ways, the original Mick Dundee.

He carried this simple approach to life into his cricket as well. He was always having a go at us in England for attempting to overcomplicate the game. As an individual, he never seemed to feel nerves at all. He had an almost childlike ability to remain unaffected by pressure and this gave him the ability to treat a World Cup final the same as he would a game in the street with his mates.

The time that Symmo struggles is in difficult social situations. At that PCA dinner on Wednesday evening, each of the Australia players was seated on a separate table, all of them would have been expected to mingle and make small talk with corporate guests. That was never going to be Symmo’s scene and it wouldn’t have surprised me if a few drinks passed his lips in those circumstances.

On hearing the news about him yesterday, I felt incredibly saddened. That hulking great man had been brought low by his own demons and was facing a long, long flight back home. It is a great shame because Symmo is a good bloke, a tremendous cricketer and Australia will be a poorer side without him.