Matthew Hayden Encompasses His Core Philosophies Of Crictainment

Ah, Matthew Hayden, you mad old robot, you... At some point since you last walked from the crease, that big iron face of yours screwed into its familiar emoticon of furious bafflement that the oppo have had the wherewithal to dismiss the great Haydos; since the Baggy Green lid was prized off for the final time, something has happened, and it is not something expected, or something good...

A virus has been imported, the Haydos hard drive has been wiped and replaced by a Trojan Horse. The mouth that once opened only to emit variations of the phrase 'fuck off' from first slip has been reprogrammed by a mid-90s management guru. He is now the proprietor of something called The Hayden Way.

'As I encompass my core philosophies, it is with the creation of The Hayden Way...' the Bot said. 'we have been developing projects to engage people on a multitude of levels. Through branded media, bespoke events, community projects, education and activities that encourage everyone to enjoy the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle.'

A tour of its website reveals The Hayden Way to be nothing more sinister than an optimistic mish-mash of college-course brand-building, corporate pluggery ['Jet! Matthew Hayden's Number One airline choice!'] and reality TV shows starring Matthew Hayden.

Yet, as any Hollywood movie about rogue computerised life-forms will tell you, there is a grand scheme behind the rebranding of the Haydos robot. The Hayden Way wants to own a slice of something that it - and no doubt soon the rest of mankind - is calling 'crictainment'.

'Crictainment' is a revolutionary compounding of 'cricket' and 'entertainment' that involves privately-owned big city franchise teams playing each other in an annual T20 competition. But before you start, this one's in Australia. Hayden is the first investor in Brisbane Heat, a team for which he will also play.

'I have had little interest in the T20 format domestically whilst it remained a state based format, which to me, was a pathway or development program to National interests. A system, I hasten to add, that I received the benefit of as a player,' the Bot went on.

'But an eight-team Big Bash League structure – involving separate organisations running these entities with Private Equity stakeholders in the future – has launched the 'Business of Cricket' and relaunched my interest as a highly viable business decision, adding value both to The Hayden Way, and also to me personally on the field.'

A veteran of 103 Tests, the reprogrammed Haydos no longer sees value in series against any teams other than England or India. 'I love the baggy green, I love what it stands for,' he droned. 'However short of the Ashes, and potentially the Indian summer, I've said for a long time that I'm largely un-invested in that particular competition'

So bad luck South Africa, catch you later Sri Lanka. No-one wants to see you beating Australia any more. West Indies, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Pakistan... well, wouldn't want to be you guys.

Like the Terminator, The Haydos bot ended its statement by foreshadowing its own destruction: 'John Buchanan said when he was coach of Australia and Queensland that his ideal scenario was to become redundant in that role, and he did that by lifting up the younger players into the more iconic positions. I think I can add that value to the dressing room as well.'

In other words.... Er Matty... fuck off, mate.

Haydos: The Coalface Of Competitive Battle

There is a piece of received wisdom being repeated endlessly in these last few days before the merciful onset of play. It's a piece of received wisdom that suits a desperate-sounding Australia, and it deserves to be challenged.

It has just been restated by the wondrous Haydos, in that unique Haydos tongue: 'There is an enormous build-up and the heat is on you. You are at the coalface of competitive battle, you are under pressure... It will be play on at a venue which is really really tough for anyone who sits outside these boundaries'.

'There's been a lot made of England's preparation,' Ricky Ponting went on, 'but they don't play a match at the Gabba before the first Test'.

Ah, the old Gabba chestnut, the Gabbatoir etc etc. It's a strange one, because it's not the arena itself, which has lost much of its character to commerce in the last decade or so. I feel vaguely qualified to comment because I lived in Brisbane for three years at the time it was being reinvented - along with much of Brissie - from Queensland country town to thrusting contemporary cityscape.

It's now a vast, unshaded bowl, its major competitive disadvantage for visitors coming in the heat, which in November, the rainy season, builds throughout the day in boom and bust style until the frequent afternoon rains, and in the pitch, which holds demons when you bat against Aussie bowlers with the strength to whack it in and then becomes a road when they take guard. Neither are decisive as and of themselves.

What accompanies them is that fearsome record, but that has less to do with the ground than the opposition, seeing as how it coincides with the matchless Australian dynasty of the late twentieth century. It is a reputation compounded by a further conventional notion, that the first session is a kind of weird, witchy premonition of the months to come. The hope is that Slater's first-ball boundary, Nasser's toss and Harmi's wide linger in the English national psyche.

But the two Ashes series of recent memory won by England saw them start with a heavy defeat at Lord's in 2005, and a skin-of-the-teeth draw at Cardiff. Thus it's hard to extrapolate that Brisbane is vital, and even harder to conclude that the first couple of hours offer the key to the Ashes. More likely that it will be a slow-burn series that will go to the wire. England are more than used to starting badly.

England don't need to fear the Gabba, or defeat there. Neither are insurmountable.

Stats of the day with Haydos and the MCC

'Thousands': The number of balls Matthew Hayden had to hit with the Mongoose before he felt 'mentally prepared' to play with it.

One: The number of days it took for bowlers to start complaining about the pink ball.

Notes on stat one: Even Haydos admitted he found the short blade 'intimidating'. How glad Mongoose must be he gave this interview.

Notes on stat two: If we're going to continue to play matches on pitches like roads in forty degree heat, it won't matter if they bowl a Rubik's Cube, it ain't gonna swing or seam. It's not the ball we should be talking about...

Use your proper bat next time, eh?

This time last year, Matthew Hayden had, quite plaintively, gone barebat. Now our favourite pigeon-chested, gum-chewing tough guy has a deal, and it's the deal everyone is talking about. He's only gone and called for the Mongoose. And what's more, he's had the minerals to call for the original Mongoose, too, the little one, as opposed to the full-sized bats they're now making.

It's been interesting, and a little complex. The first time that Haydos issued the call [and surely it's only a matter of time before Mongoose provide him with some sort of pocket-sized Viking horn which he can blow when he wants it brought out], he bludgeoned five fours and seven sixes from the next 34 balls he faced. The second time he pulled it out, for the highly entertaining super over between CSK and Punjab yesterday, he was knocked over first ball, a ball he missed by a spectacular and not undisturbing distance.

First the obvious point. The Mongoose is not aimed at a player like Matthew Hayden, who can clear any boundary on earth with a regular bat and thus need not increase his risk. Until Lalit Modi decides to reward big shots with runs commensurate to the distance hit [oh, it'll happen...], the only value Hayden gained was novelty. The trajectory of his hits seemed slightly shallower, the forward momentum slightly greater, not unlike a punched iron shot in golf. He also selected his moment well, a flat low pitch on a day where pitching short was even more fraught with risk for the bowler. On those terms, it was a marketing stunt, nothing more. Unless you have an eye like Hayden's the bat remains essentially useless, or at least disadvantageous, in a match situation.

In short [and it is short], it's a very IPL bat. And yet a new piece of kit is teaching an old lesson. Hayden's power with the Mongoose came from the batspeed. The long handle helped, but the force of the hit came from the overall lightness of the bat. If the club player is to draw some value from the Mongoose, it's that weight is key. There's no point in having a bat so heavy you can't swing it fast. It's nothing new. As WG said of his first coach, his uncle Pocock, 'he made sure I had a bat to suit my strength'. 

What would be truly interesting would be to see Hayden using a full-size blade of around 2lbs 7oz. My guess is he'd hit it as far as the Mongoose. There's another interesting bat about to come onto the market, the Joker. It is more traditional in shape, but with the kind of profile you'd find on John Holmes in tight shorts. It weighs 2lbs 8ozs, and I guess [again] that it is the VHS to the Mongoose's Betamax. 

A final thought. If I was captaining against Hayden, I'd have the bowler try and knock his head off, and not bother about him being called for no balls. That'd be controversial, and Lalit would love it, of course... 

Matty Hayden walks the earth: the Ashes media, mano et mano

'Ah Paris... marvellous. The Louvre... walking up the hill to Montmartre. Fabulous city...'

Matthew Hayden paused. 'One of the great pleasures of coming over here is getting the chance to go to historic places like that.'

And one of the great, and unexpected pleasures of the summer was Matthew Hayden, who split his time between Test Match Special and the Channel Five highlights show, and who, like Kwai Chang Kane, has apparently put aside worldly things to walk the earth instead.

'I went walking around London last night,' he said. 'Summer's night, strolling around the streets, stopping at a couple of pubs for a beer... wonderful'.

For some reason, when I pictured Haydos doing this, he was in his cricket gear, too. And barefoot. As England tipped the balance of the Oval Test by running out Punter and Clarke in consecutive overs, he welcomed Jim Maxwell to the mic by saying, 'Good on ya Jim, I feel like I need another Aussie here at this point. I'm quite emotional...'

The new caring, sharing Hayden still had his sharp side, most notably in his now famous spat with Geoffrey. 

'Your batting emptied grounds, mate,' he said, no doubt out of the side of his mouth while still mentally at first slip. 

Exit Geoffrey, muttering. But thankfully not for long. Boycott got every prediction he made wrong this summer, but that's because they were almost always based on the kind of sound logic that the series refused to obey.

TMS has copped some flak, but the mix of Haydos, Geoffrey and Phil Tufnell made it a joy to listen to. Tufnell is as self-effacing as the two great batsmen are proud. Asked about his greatest fear, while others waffled about planes and spiders, Tuffers deadpanned: 'Mark Waugh'.

Sky opted for Warne as their resident legend, and once you got past the teeth - surely some kind of spin-off from NASA research - he was worth what must have been a reassuringly expensive fee. The real difference in his commentary came in his willingness to stick his neck on the line and call the play. Sky's collective of ex-England captains in the 'comm box' could do nothing but genuflect. Add Ravi Bopara to his list of Test victims. 

Beefy at least had someone to share his jokes about not training and coming in at 5am with. The heirarchy - Sky-erarchy? - revealed itself via the banter. Botham admitted Warnie to the club that contains himself, Michael Holding and sometimes David Gower. Nasser and Athers remain the butt of Beefy humour ['you'd have had about 18 by now wouldn't you Nass?' he'd enquire, just before tea]. Bumble is the mad uncle at the party, capable, like most jokers, of concealing the truth in humour.

Sky's technology is the real star of their show. Hawkeye versus Aleem Dar, super slo-mo versus Asad Rauf were heavyweight contests with only one winner.

Half mental

When we last left Matthew Hayden [as opposed to Matthew Hayden's bat], he was finished, done, a once-sleek great white laying gutted on the beach. 

It's amazing what a break can do. There he was in the IPL, proudly wearing the orange cap over hair he'd razored back to the bone. He was all business. 

The role of ego in batting is misunderstood: ego is a defence mechanism. Hayden's was breached by the end of his Test career, his decline was mental as much as physical. The basic function of batting, unimprovably distilled to 'see ball, hit ball' by Virender Sehwag, was still intact, as the IPL let him show. 

There's your answer as to the real demands of Test match cricket. Haydos was a bit like a boxer whose chin went before his punch.

Michael Vaughan has had a break too, but he has not come back like Hayden. He's almost slipped from the radar now. He's playing T20 too, but for Yorkshire, and not very well. His desire must be draining away, and the thought that his decline was caused by mental fatigue is going with it. There must a physical element to it, too, something he can't quite recapture. Once that's gone, it's gone forever.

Matty Hayden goes barebat

He's back again, huge of chest, pigeon-legged, strutting and chewing, vast eyebrows scoring their wide V... Yeah, it's Haydos, the world's most beloved Australian, and he's even wearing gold... well, more like canary yellow actually, especially the helmet. 

But something's different. A long-term Gray-Nicolls man, Hayden went barebat today. The devil. Presumably his sponsorship deal ended on his international retirement. It was somehow more apparent because almost every inch of the IPL franchise shirts are logoed. 

It's usually bowlers who take to the crease with this plaintive, unspoken plea - they're probably just hoping for a couple of freebies in the post. There was something more aggressive about Hayden's statement. After all, if he was really not bothered he could have just kept the old stickers on in cheery thanks for the good times. 

Instead, Hayden bristled. Big egos die hard. He still considers himself a player, and he batted well. If I were an ambitious batmaker, an arriviste maybe, I'd take a punt. Adidas? Nike? Were you watching?

NB: In more dispiriting news, Test Match Special have announced that Hayden will be part of their team for the Ashes. Are they really going to tell us that Hayden, at best a man of colloquial grunts, is the most appropriate man for the job? 

Haigh and mighty

Gideon Haigh's farewell to Matthew Hayden in today's Guardian was a couple of weeks late, but to mangle a cliche, if it's good enough who cares how old it is?

Haigh's is very good indeed, and he seems as engaged as everyone else by Hayden. Writers love an enigma, and Hayden's character and career are divisive things, inherently contradictory. 

He pulls out a glorious stat and a raging sledge to make an incisive point. The stat is that Hayden averaged 67 under the captaincy of Steve Waugh and 41 elsewhere. The sledge came after he took Zaheer Khan apart in the World Cup Final. 'Smell that Z?' he said. 'That's your house in India burning down'.

Haydos was Waugh's battering ram, the bull-chested alpha-male given license to mete out the mental disintegration. The pay-off for Hayden was the peace that continuity offered him. 

Haigh began his piece with some EJ Thribb: 'So Farewell then Haydos/mental disintegration/That was your catchphrase/Keith's mum pointed out that you have a higher test average than either Viv Richards or Denis Compton/But I found you about as interesting as your nickname'.

That's part of the reason why Haigh can write about Hayden two weeks late and still be worth reading. It's also part of the reason why the media should not consist solely of ex-cricketers. 

Further evidence was provided by another of today's intros, this one from Mike Atherton. 'In this week of fresh starts and renewed hope,' he wrote, 'has English cricket found, in Andrew Strauss, its Barack Obama?' 

That is probably the single most stupid sentence in all of the newspapers this year, and I'm including the Daily Mail. Private Eye run a regular round-up of tenuous and tortuous analogies made by hacks attempting to link their unrelated copy into the big story of the day. If Atherton doesn't make the Obama-Balls section, I'll eat Channel 9's Baggy Green ceramic replica.

Haydos and Hick: Time's Arrow

Great players tend to create a consensus, at least about their greatness. The reception for Matthew Hayden has been ambiguous. Opinion has been less keen to coalesce, but there has been plenty of it. Perhaps the best measure of what he achieved is the desire the world has to write about him. Don't read it, Matty, weigh it.

Peter Roebuck at Cricinfo and Richard Hobson in The Times danced around the subject of Haydos as belligerent bully, one more lightly than the other. Roebuck dwelled on his divided character: 'his conclusions about himself and his game confronted each other'. Hobson touched on two incidents from Hayden's underwhelming Ashes tour of 2005; the England players surrounding him as he attempted to stare down Simon Jones in the Edgbaston ODI - Hayden was dismissed without further score - and his bleak, festering mindset after being accused of swearing at a child in the guard of honour in the same game. He thought England had stitched him up.

Both pieces implied that Hayden's persona was, to varying degrees, a front, and usually a very effective one. 

Roebuck also drew a comparison that hit home, with Graeme Hick. He was talking about their early careers, parallel lives that featured the battering of first class attacks before a chastening entry into Test cricket. 

Hayden reinvented himself, Hick did not, and Roebuck put it down to Hayden's location. 'Hick might have made it in Australia,' he wrote.

It's a tantalising thought, but I'm not sure it's true. It's more an accident of time than location: Hick is five years older, and just caught the last wave of great fast bowling: Ambrose and Walsh, Wasim and Waqar. 

Hick debuted in 1991, Hayden in '94. Hick played all but 11 of his 65 matches before 2000. Hayden played 96 of his 103 from 2000 onwards. 

King Cricket nailed the point. Hayden averaged 21.75 during that time. Conversely, Hick had a three year spell from 1993-6 when he averaged 45. 

Ambrose retired in 2000, Walsh in 2001, Wasim and Allan Donald in 2002, Waqar in 2003. Hayden may have learned how to succeed against these men; it's unfair to assume that he wouldn't. But he would have been a different kind of player, and opinion might not be quite so divided.

The Parable of Matthew and the Burning Bush

And Matthew walked in the garden until he found a bush of tomatoes and he bent to pick them. And the bush spake with him. It said 'You shall not score 380 against Zimbabwe again. Nor shall you play in the Boxing Day Test, nor in any others'.

And Matthew listened and was glad it was the tomato plant that spake with him and not Andrew Hilditch.

'Dress in new robes and head forth to give my words to the world,' the tomato bush said, and then it burst into flames that rose into the sky. 

And Matthew put on his new robes, which were not of green and gold but of grey, and they did not have upon them the logos of KFC or Travelex. 

And pilgrim Ricky sat with him as he spoke, and Ricky did still wear the cap of KFC and this gave Matthew comfort.

'What will you do now,' asked those who he had once outcast, and he said to them, 'tonight I shall appear in a chariot of blue before the crowds at Woolloongabba. And I shall speak with them and tell them that I shall lift my bat once more for the Chennai Super Kings. 

And then I shall remember stories of the years of Justin and of Shane and Glenn, and of Adam and before him of Steve and Mark and others. And those stories shall be called 'Matthew Hayden: The Autobiography'. And the crowds shall buy it.

And then I shall walk into the wilderness, which they know as the outback, and I shall tell them to follow me. And Pilgrim Roy will bring fishes with him, and I will take them and make them feed fifty, with barbecue sauce.

And I will cast my board upon the water, and they shall remember me and the things I have done, and the story of the tomato bush.

Haydos: A farewell to arms

England is separated from Australia by more than distance. From afar it's easy to paint Oz as a less nuanced country built on principals of straightforwardness, mateship and a national pride unaffected by nationalism.  

Having lived there for three years a while ago, I think it's more complex than that. We share a lot more than we'd admit to. But yesterday, I found myself doing something peculiarly English: feeling a kind of affectionate sadness for an intractable opponent, Matthew Hayden.

There was lots of coverage in the papers and online of Jane McGrath Day, which was launched by Glenn and Hayden the day before the Sydney Test. There was Haydos, in a pink helmet, shoulder to shoulder with his great mate, letting Glenn's nine year-old son bowl him out in the nets (at least he said he was letting him. Given his current form, one might have crept through). It was a vision of genuine, lasting friendship.

Hayden is emblematic of his country. Imposing, huge, sun-cracked, he bats with ego that sometimes tips into hubris. It's an ego, like many, grown in response to the trials and insecurities of his youth. Years of success seemed to have made it impenetrable. 

But his sudden vulnerability somehow highlights the scale of his achievement. He probably knows, in his heart of hearts, that it's gone, but he still walks back out there, and will again in Sydney. 

Australians love to win. England's relationship with victory, and with winners, is ambiguous. The example that comes to mind is the image of Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath walking off the ground together in the sun at the Oval after the last Test of 2005. There was a pride and nobility to their exit that, to this Englishman at least, exceeded the swagger at the end of the rematch. 

Therein lies the difference, I think. Hayden wouldn't have chosen this type of farewell, and he'd probably regard the empathy of the English as about as welcome as a text from Harbhajan, but it somehow makes him greater. 

The executioner's song

Conventional wisdom says that the greats wake up one day and just know. But how? How can they? Because often the quality that separates them from the rest is belief, and that rarely ever dies, bound up as it is with ego and self-image.

Some go gently into that good night. Others rage against the dying of the light. You won't get two more opposing departures than those of Justin Langer and Steve Waugh, for example. But they had the inevitable in common. They both understood they would have to go, one way or the other. 

Matthew Hayden knows it, hears the whispers. Like the old soldier, his talk is all of his fallen comrades. 'When they leave,' he sighed this week, 'a part of you goes with them'. His winsomeness contrasts with the thousand yard stare that Katich wears as standard. That guy's desire is the property of the unfulfilled.

Hayden has scored so many runs even he must be almost sated by now, and the numbers carry their own hints. 

It has been ten innings since his last hundred. Those innings have been: 0, 13, 0, 29, 83, 16*, 16, 77, 8, 0, an average of 26.88 against a career 52.04.

Steve Waugh's last hundred came nine innings before the end: 78, 61, 0, 56*, 30, 42, 19, 40, 80, an average of 50.75 against a career 51.06.

Justin Langer's last hundred came eight innings before the end: 4, 7, 37, 0, 27, 26, 20*, an average of 20.16 against a career 45.77.

Waugh averaged a hundred every eight innings (32 in 260), Langer one in eight (23 in 182), Hayden one in six (30 in 177). Hayden's stat is leant more weight by the fact he once went 30 innings without one.

The statistics say Hayden is waning. Waugh raged. Langer knew. Hayden hears the song, too.

When the Australian war machine was at its peak, they surrounded your castle and used Hayden as a battering ram. He has been the most okker of Aussies, and therefore not the most loved elsewhere, but it's impossible not to salute him. 

The best compliment I heard paid to an Australian from an Englishman came from Mick Jagger to their opening bowler. 'Glenn McGrath,' he said, reclining in his chair in the pavilion at Lord's. 'What a bastard'.

You knew what he meant. Matty Hayden, what a bastard too.