“I can still see his face at pre-season,” says Jack Russell, recalling the arrival of a 19-year-old Andrew Symonds at Gloucester in the spring of 1995. “He was hungry, really hungry. That season I had us in a few weeks early to work on our fitness and he was outdoing everyone. His batting was on a different level and his fielding was way above everyone else.

“His professionalism and commitment was second to none. I know he’s had problems since but with us he was like a breath of fresh air. He was dragging everybody forward and we all got a buzz off him. We loved his attitude and were so excited with his talent.”

A few months later came Symonds’ outlandish breakout knock, the Birmingham-born Aussie peppering the postage stamp of a ground at Pen-y-Pound, Abergavenny with 16 sixes in an innings – a first-class record which stood for 20 years. The boundaries may have been small but those present at Gloucestershire’s County Championship match against Glamorgan agreed that the majority of those sixes would have gone the distance at most grounds in the world.

The following year, having become a T20 gun for hire, Symonds expressed his relief that he was free from the cocoon of international cricket. “I wasn’t having fun anymore,” he told the Guardian in June 2010, soon after joining Surrey – back at the ground where he’d first made his mark in county cricket 15 years previously. “I wasn’t enjoying it. I felt like I was in a cage. Always under the microscope. Once I had got home from England, and everything had settled down, it was a relief.”

He spent another year on the T20 circuit before retiring from all cricket in 2011, despite the lucrative contracts on offer. For Hollioake, it was inevitable that Symonds’ career would come to a sudden conclusion.

“Andrew Symonds was never going to be a guy who hung on right to the end,” he says, “because when you’ve got players who are wearing the right stuff to training, and not going out drinking, and doing and saying the right things in team meetings, and all of a sudden he’s not producing match-winning performances every third or fourth game, then he became a bit of a liability. As soon as he wasn’t winning matches regularly, then he wasn’t going to be in the side, because he brought problems off the field. But I know I’d want him in my team.”

Symonds, now 45, appears to have rekindled his love for the game in recent years, joining Fox Sport’s Big Bash commentary team for the past two seasons. “I thought it could end in disaster but he’s going well,” says Hollioake.

Remarried with two kids, he lives in Townsville, north Queensland – not too far from where he grew up. No matter what it says on his birth certificate, it’s always been home.