Telling it like it is

Usually you can expect Australia's sports media to toe the party line when it comes to supporting Australian cricketers and Australian cricket. But the Daily Telegraph has just told Cricket Australia where to stuff its spin-doctoring:

ANDREW Symonds' column will no longer appear in The Sunday Telegraph.

After twice being gagged by Cricket Australia, Symonds has been bullied into believing the only way to do a column with this paper is to have it ghost-written by cricket officials.

This paper had no interest in running a column that is not only vetted by Cricket Australia but also written by its employees.

We remain a big fan of Symonds and hope that should this situation change, we can again have him as a columnist. As last week's Indian Premier League auction proves, he is the most entertaining and engaging cricketer in the world.

But in the current cricket landscape, with the fascinating IPL-led revolution, there is little value in listening to the CA party line.

This paper would never enter into such an arrangement which encourages James Sutherland to continue running CA like a dictatorship. Nor would we expect our readers to have to put up with CA's spin-doctoring and half-truths.