Book review: 'Standing My Ground' asks: Was Matthew Hayden was hitman or genial giant?

Standing My Ground
Matthew Hayden
Harper Collins
402 pages
Rs599

Matthew Hayden’s book, Standing My Ground, begins with a fierce, albeit unconvincing, defence of sledging, and ends with a warm and captivating account of how the IPL broke down cultural barriers, challenged mindsets and forged friendships between rivals.

It’s a contradiction, but that’s exactly what Hayden claims he is: a man of contradictions. I don’t buy it, however.

The real Haydos is the one you get to know as you flip through the pages of his life, from a boy growing up on a peanut farm near Brisbane to a fat teenager struggling to get into his school’s First XI, from playing the hitman in the Australian team to taking on the mantle of senior player for Chennai Super Kings.

Fun with F-words
For all his exploits in a stellar cricket career, it was in the IPL that the real Hayden seems to have found expression. In the second IPL season played in South Africa, he got the orange cap for the most runs in the tournament, despite having retired from international cricket by then. He told his former coach that he felt liberated, finding a balance between work and play that let his natural ability flow. “I could just relax and play.”

The third IPL season was leaner for him personally, but by then Chennai felt like a second home and he had begun to enjoy the role given to him by Dhoni as a mentor for the younger players.

One day he decided to give the Chennai boys a piece of his mind because he felt they were letting themselves down with too many late night parties. It was an expletive-laden, finger-stabbing address, but he could tell it was hitting home by the way they were nodding along with him.

At the end of it, his Aussie team-mate George Bailey asked the Sri Lankan Thilan Thushara what he thought of it. Thushara said he could understand the F-words but apart from that, nothing. “Oh well, I tried,” writes Hayden, with resignation. There’s a limit to bridging cultural gaps, I suppose.

He will probably hate the description, but at the end of the day, Hayden does come across as this gentle giant: a compulsive surfer, an experimental foodie, and an intelligent cricketer who was always innovative.

So how do you reconcile that with the image you have of him charging into bowlers, sneering at batsmen and ganging up with Symo and Punter against Bhajji? It’s a question that Hayden himself has had to deal with: “In retirement, I confront the demons of introspection.”

Chirping or cheating?
He rationalises the sledging that had become a part of the Aussie team’s game-plan under Steve Waugh and then Ricky Ponting. Each person was assigned a role in what they called the “mental disintegration” of the opposition, until Cricket Australia finally stamped it out because it projected a loutish stereotype of their country.

Hayden’s size and close-in fielding position put him at the forefront of this pack of sledgers. As with every other aspect of his cricket, he tried to play his role to perfection. This would extend off the field, where he would avoid any personal connection even with the players he admired, whom he might later have to sledge.

The intense inner turmoil this must have aroused is evident. “It killed me to distance myself, from Lara in particular… Brian Lara just captivated me. Every time he took the crease, it was like a batting tutorial. Being a left-hander, I was all over his every move… Lara shaped my thoughts and actions about playing spin bowling.

If anyone has played spin better, I haven’t seen him. In fact, Lara didn’t so much play spin bowlers as play with them — with their minds and with their captains’ minds, exploiting field placements like some wicked puppeteer.”

And yet, in keeping with the title of his book, Hayden maintains that “chirping” as he calls it has always been a part of the game. What he glosses over is that banter, or even something said in the heat of battle, is fundamentally different from its deliberate, systematic use to disturb a batsman’s concentration.

There’s only one word for that: cheating. Maybe after some more introspection Hayden will find it within himself to admit that mind-games are one thing, and surreptitiously directing a barb at a batsman to break his concentration is something else.

The Hayden shuffle
This is after all not a phenomenon unique to cricket. Players like John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase were past masters at using tantrums to fire themselves up and bad-mouthing opponents to throw them off track. Tennis decided enough was enough, and now you can’t imagine a Federer or a Nadal employing such unfair tactics.

Hayden’s claim that sledging contributed in a major way to the Australian domination over world cricket in that era is also an injustice to the quality of the team to which he belonged. Hayden, Ponting, Steve Waugh, Gilchrist, Warne and McGrath are among the all-time greats of cricket, and to have them all in one team makes for a pretty invincible combination, even without sledging.

Perhaps they would’ve lost a few more games than they did, but they would’ve still been the best in the world, and their exploits would’ve been celebrated around the world instead of being derided.

What you can appreciate though is Hayden’s candid effort to describe the sledging he practised and how it affected him. In fact, it is the mix of psychological and cricketing insights Hayden provides that makes his book stand out in bookshelves groaning under the weight of so many books by cricketers which are desperately bland and obviously ghost-written.

Hayden also has a lot to say that is surprising and enlightening, because he was so innovative as a cricketer and studied the game deeply. For example, when you think of sports that cricketers might use for cross-training, something like table-tennis comes readily to mind. But surfing?

Hayden felt that apart from the hours and hours he spent at the nets, what contributed the most to his batting was his love for surfing. The sure-footedness and balance it gave him were what enabled the famous Haydos walk down the pitch even to bowlers of the calibre of Flintoff, who writes in the book’s foreword: “The one thing I really struggled to come to grips with was that even when you dropped short to him after he’d done the ‘Hayden shuffle’, he still managed to pull and hook your best work. I’m sure I bowled bouncers to Hayden that weren’t pulled for four or six, but I can’t remember them.”

That Flintoff, who copped some of the worst of Hayden’s sledging, can write such a glowing account shows that he too discovered the real Hayden over a beer or two when they played together for Chennai Super Kings.