Once, while watching a documentary on Tibet, something quite close to my heart was being projected. It was about a young kid’s desire to have his own leather ball and bat and to play cricket.
While viewing the programme, a sense of melancholy also overtook me. I definitely knew even if he had the desire to play the game and he may have possessed the initial talent what it takes to make a cricketer of substance, he will never make it to the level of a Tendulkar, a Mahendra Singh Dhoni or for that matter the first grade state cricket in India.

He may have been born at the right time – especially when the Indian sub-continent has evolved into the commercial hub of the game. But, at the same time he was born in the wrong place. In that part of Tibet a young child may love the game of cricket like any other child of any other nation would do. But, he would never have the opportunities that the Tendulkar’s had. This child was born across the border in a country where officially cricket is still alien.

Coach Tim Nielsen has a few words of advice for ‘Roy’

Though for ‘Roy’ who was born to mixed parentage In Birmingham, but was brought up in Queensland Australia in his formative years may have had the same desire like the Tibetan Child. However the opportunities he had were great and he was born in the right place at the right time.

One of Symonds' biological parents was of Afro-Caribbean background. Symonds' adoptive parents Ken and Barbara moved to Australia when he was aged three months old. He spent the early part of his childhood in Charters Towers, northern Queensland, where his father Ken taught at a fee levying private school where Andrew also studied.

Much of his junior cricket was played in Townsville for the Wanderers club, father and son making the 270-kilometre return trip sometimes twice a week. The family later moved to the Gold Coast.
Andrew Symonds once won the Cricket Writers' Club's prestigious Young Cricketer of the Year award following a successful debut season with Gloucestershire. He was selected for the England A tour of Pakistan that winter, but pulled out in order to win a place in the Australian side.

Unlike the child in Tibet, Symonds did get the opportunities to blossom out in what he really enjoyed doing – playing cricket.

Separamadu Lasith Malinga, born on August 28, 1983, in a tiny hamlet in the Galle district, learned the rudiments of cricket at a very young age while playing softball cricket, but, it was not until he was eighteen years old, that he familiarized himself with the leather-ball and still he did not know about the doors that would open in front of him and thus lead to opportunities similar to Alice in wonderland.
Bowling at almost blinding pace with a very unusual slingy action, Malinga was a winner from the very beginning of his leather-ball tale. Once put on the track there was no looking back, the Malinga train kept on ‘chugging’.

Both cricketers made their first Test appearances in 2004 and up to now have worn the white for their respective countries on 22 and 28 times in order.

Immensely talented, both cricketers are charged up characters, but, that very thing they have taken beyond the peripheries of the boundary lines and now have fallen out of grace.

Prior to his latest antic, Symonds was in trouble twice before. First came when he reached the players’ bus late. On the second occasion he has walked into the players’ room still under the influence of liquor prior to an international match.

Associates say Symonds has not dealt well with his sudden rise to prominence in the Test arena, which made him the team's poster boy in all three formats of the game. His $1.47 million Indian Premier League contract with Hyderabad also brought with it huge demands for his time.

Lasith Malinga with a Sri Lankan cricket fan while touring Australia