Crucket

Maybe he’s just doing it to confuse us, but Matthew Hayden has gone all nice in his retirement.

Firstly, he’s working to promote the development of cricket amongst Aborigines. A most admirable mission.

Secondly, he’s saying some charitable things about the state of New Zealand cricket. At least I think so. He at least attempts to blame the ICC for the state of things here. It’s just not entirely clear what he thinks of the state of things. He recognises that our international schedule has been disappointing, and we do play less matches than almost all the other teams. The problem he sees, however, seems to be that McCullum is not getting paid enough. Jeez, maybe it’s just the communist in me, but McCullum is the last Black Cap to need a top up to his salary.

But anyway, taking his comments at face value it is encouraging to hear these sentiments from outside NZ:

It’s pretty tough. I feel very sympathetic towards a country like New Zealand, which has some wonderful cricketers but they don’t get enough international opportunities.

The papers are reporting that the ICC has named Matthew Hayden as one of the top 10 test batsmen of all time. Here’s the list and there’s Hayden, sitting at 10th equal.

The Indian’s aren’t happy. Not necessarily with Hayden’s position in the list, but with the fact that Sachin Tendulkar sits all the way down at 26. Tendulkar surely belongs higher on the list, definitely above Hayden. Tendulkar has more runs, more centuries and a higher average than Hayden.

I’m not going to enter that particular debate. I do think that Hayden is overrated. While he as an excellent batsman, he was basically an expert flat-track bully in an era of flat tracks. (Perhaps I only feel this way because we hardly got to see Hayden at his best. His record against New Zealand was not that impressive.) However, I also think that, inspite of his acknowledged genius, India are equally able to overrate Tendulkar.

The Indian bleating about the list is actually pretty funny. The BCCI secretary even seems to believe it is all a conspiracy to raise the profile of the ICC ranking system above Indian systems.

It only takes a quick look at the list to see that it only ranks the players based on their highest ever achieved rating. That is a long way from measuring how good a player is overall. So Hayden peaked higher than Tendulkar. However, check out the comparison of the two players. Tendulkar maintained a high rating for much longer than Hayden (noting that the time base for the graphs are different). If you change it to a view of ranking charts, you see that Tendulkar maintained an unbroken top 10 ranking for over 10 years, whereas Hayden only managed this for about 5 years. The ICC ranking blogger has noted that Tendulkar played 125 matches in the top 3, his measure of sustained excellence. You can draw your own conclusions from all of this, but it does show that there are innumerable ways of measuring greatness.

Hayden would be odds on to keep his place for the final test against South Africa. He has a big record behind him and with Symonds and Lee likely to be replaced, the selectors will be wary of going into a match with too little experience. These are just excuses however, the truth is that everyone is too scared to tell Haydos he has to go. Surely this is his last series, so what use in playing him in the dead rubber rather than giving his replacement a head start?

Good on Balls then for telling him he should go with dignity and to Cricinfo for shaming the selectors for not having the balls to drop him. In fact, they’re writing his obituaries over at Cricinfo already. How good is Haydos? they ask? Only as good as the bowlers are bad is the answer. Hayden will likely finish with an average over 50, 30 hundreds, a high score of 380…an awesome record. However, Hayden only really got going in 2001, 7 years after his debut, but which time “Hayden’s earliest tormentors – Donald and de Villiers; Ambrose, Courtney Walsh and Ian Bishop – had all conked out. Shaun Pollock’s zippiest days were behind him, Chris Cairns’ too. The few lethal quicks still in circulation were playing on the same side as Hayden”