Matthew Hayden

Matthew Hayden is a left handed opening batsman of the Australian cricket team. Born in 1971, this 35 years old batsman is powerful hitter of the ball and an excellent team player. However, one of his greatest strengths is the fact he is also a fisherman and loves to fish with his best mate and partner in crime, Symonds and is also a surfer, which gives him an aggressive stance and the physical power to batter the ball throughout the field. This makes Hayden, on of the strongest weapon in the Australian batting line up.

Matt Hayden made is ODI debut against England at Manchester in 1993 and his test debut in the following year against South Africa at Johannesburg. Thereafter, his initial tests were exclusively against South Africa and West Indies. There were, however some complaints regarding his test playing abilities mainly due to the way in which he played around his front pad. But his mental and physical strength made it possible for him to beat his critics and achieve amazing heights in batsmanship. He was good in the tests especially since the 2000-01 tour of India, and this fact is made obvious by his test match stats. In the 159 innings that he has been on the pitch, he has scored 7739 runs with an average of 53. He also has a mammoth high score of 380 which he had scored against Zimbabwe, scoring the highest score by a batsman in Test matches at that time. All this goes on to show the kind of force he is in the Australian arsenal.

That he is an excellent player in the one day format of the game as well was a fact that became known belatedly, but by the time of the 2003 World Cup, he was among the top three batsman in both forms of the game. His stats in the ODI format also speak volumes of his skills in them. He has scored 4840 runs in his 130 ODI innings with an average of over 41 and a high score of unbeaten 181. He is also an exceptional fielder, especially at the slips and the gully.

Hayden experienced a drop in form during the 2004-05 season and was therefore replaced by Michael Clarke as the one-day opener for his team. His poor performance and inefficient footwork continued against England, and his form saw an upward trend only towards the end of the series at The Oval where he managed to score 138 runs. Thereafter, he became a more patient player than he was earlier. But he still continued scrambling runs for his team henceforth scoring three hundreds in successive matches thereby becoming only the third player after Bradman and Barrington to score four in a row twice. Thereafter he also passed 1000 runs in that year for the fifth time. In the final match of the 2006-07 Chappell-Hadlee series he thumped an Australian-record 181 off 166 balls, which included ten sixes and again showed his impressive power. Each of these instances proved that he was a player whose credentials could not be questioned, be it in the tests or the One Day Internationals.

Matthew Hayden has also received awards which he can rightfully boast of. The most notable ones include the ‘Allan Border Medal’ in the year 2002, the ‘Test Player of the Year’ in 2002 and the ‘Wisden Cricketer of the Year’ in 2003.‘Haydos’, as he is fondly called, is therefore a force to reckon with in the Australian team. A cricketer whose contribution to the game will be remembered for generations to come.