Mathew Hayden always came across as tough as nails, ready for a fight and someone who sledged as if it was written in the rules of the game. Off the field, he was the opposite. Warm and genial, he has also published three cook books. So it’s not surprising when he writes in his autobiography, “I am what I am. A man of contradictions. There’s the real me, and then there’s the person many people think I am.”
Since the great Australian side of the late nineties and early noughties was so good and had talented players like Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Hayden, we tend to believe that life was a bed of roses for them. But Hayden had it anything but easy.
Tipped for greatness by many – including the likes of Allan Border and Steve Waugh – Hayden piled on the runs in Australian domestic cricket. But whenever he was picked for the national team, he failed to deliver; the step-up from first-class cricket to Test cricket seemed too big for him. And he writes, “I always prided myself on being prepared for any challenge, yet on the biggest day of career to date, I wasn’t.”
Unlike most autobiographies, Standing My Ground doesn’t follow a chronology; it reads more like an account of the biggest moments in a cricketer’s career. For instance, the first chapter of the book is about sledging. Hayden was a notorious sledger and admits that “he covered his tracks well” to have never been reprimanded. But he talks about how he was at the receiving end once. That was at the 2003 World Cup when Netherlands wicket keeper Jeroen Smits told him, “We haven’t flown halfway around the world to watch you. So just take a single and get Gilly on strike because you are crap.”
He talks at length about his opening partner Justin “Alfie” Langer and how he found it hard to continue as a cricketer when Langer called it quits. There are some fascinating insights on how one of the best opening partnerships of all time worked hard to sow fear in the opposition’s minds. “We transformed our techniques in ways that made it harder for bowlers to formulate plans,” Hayden writes.
Hayden has a special India connection because it was where he made his mark as an opening batsman. In the 2001 series, he scored over 500 runs and never looked back. Hayden was an exhaustive planner and his planning worked more often than not. For instance, before that India series, he asked a pitch curator to prepare dry wickets to practise on and worked on the sweep shot. Sometimes, he didn’t make any plans. Before the 2007 World Cup, he sat on the beach with a cigar and had several famous Caribbean rum punches and decided just to “Be Free”. He topped the scoring charts in the World Cup. As he said, he was a man of contradictions.
This description is true in other ways. For instance, the infamous 2008 “Monkeygate” controversy – when colleague Andrew Symonds complained of racial abuse during a tour of India and Harbhajan Singh called him a monkey during a match at Sydney – barely finds a mention in the book. Indeed, Hayden is tight-lipped and non-committal on the issue.
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This even though his rivalry with Harbhajan Singh has been well-documented and Singh even criticised Hayden for looking for cheap publicity through his book. Hayden admits to not liking him much but puts him as “one of the toughest spinners” he has faced. He lavishes praise on Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar.
On the other hand, he is brutally honest about Indian cricket. “Here is an inescapable fact about world cricket: Australia cannot thrive without India, but India doesn’t need us to the same degree.” Now that’s an open secret but not many players would actually admit to this fact.
Even when it comes to talking about his own team-mates, Hayden doesn’t pull any punches. He never got along with Mark Taylor but had a grudging respect for him. The same goes for his one-time rival Matthew Elliott. He says that he refused to face fast bowler Shaun Tait in the nets because he was way too fast. “I was loath to face Brett Lee as well. Okay, I was scared. There, I’ve said it,” he writes.
The book is full of some great anecdotes from world and Australian cricket. Hayden describes how Shane Warne was once asked about a packet of cigarettes at a military style training camp by a serviceman, to which Warne replied, “These are medicinal”, before adding, “and just for the record, I will do everything you want me to.
But if these don’t go, the King doesn’t go.” Or the time he talks about sledging McGrath in a match between Australia and Australia “A”.
Standing My Ground is an honest account of one of the most destructive batsmen world cricket has seen. Some may not like the candidness in Hayden’s tone – for instance, he says how Zimbabwe and Bangladesh don’t deserve to play Test cricket – but overall it is a must-read for any cricket fan.
It provides a great insight into a man who was full of self-doubt about his talent but went on to become a modern-day cricketing giant.
Standing My Ground
Mathew Hayden
Harper Collins
Pages: 402
Price: Rs 599
