Cricket Australia Gabba tribute to Matthew Hayden tonight
Cricket Australia (CA) is offering Queensland fans the chance to provide local hero Matthew Hayden, who announced his retirement today, with a public farewell at tonight’s KFC International Twenty20 at the Gabba.
Hayden will appear during the innings break in tonight’s game to farewell his home town crowd at his home ground.
Meanwhile, Cricket Australia has paid tribute to Hayden’s contribution to Australian cricket, with CA Chairman Jack Clarke saying: “Matthew was one of the greatest ever players to pull on the Baggy Green.
“To open the batting with an average over 50 in 103 Test matches puts him among the all-time greats of the game.
“Matthew was an integral part of the most successful era in Australian cricket history. It would be an interesting task if the Team of the Century was to be selected today to rate Matthew against Bill Ponsford and Arthur Morris,” Mr Clarke concluded.
Hayden retires as Australia’s most successful opening batsman ever with 8625 runs at an average of 50.73 from 103 Tests. His 30 Test centuries is third to just two Australians, Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh, and ranks sixth all-time, while only three Australians have scored more runs in Test cricket (Ponting, Waugh and Allan Border).
He won the Allan Border medal in 2002, was also Test player of the year in 2002 and one-day international player of the year in 2007, and was also the ICC ODI player of the year in 2007.
The most productive period of Hayden’s career was between 2001-2005 when he scored more than 1000 Test runs in five consecutive calendar years – 1391 (2001), 1312 (2003), 1123 (2004) and 1380 (2005) – a stretch that also included a then-world record individual score of 380 against Zimbabwe at the WACA.
Under pressure to retain his Test place towards the end of the 2005 Ashes series, Hayden scored a century in the final Test at the Oval before scoring three more in successive matches to become just the third player after Sir Donald Bradman and Ken Barrington to score four hundreds in a row twice.
Hayden’s one-day international career is equally impressive. A two-time World-Cup winner, his 161 matches yielded 6131 runs (seventh all-time for Australia) at an average of 44.10.
In the final match of the 2007 Chappell Hadlee Trophy in New Zealand, Hayden thumped an Australian-record 181 not out from 166 balls in Hamilton before travelling to the Caribbean for the ICC World Cup. He ended that tournament as the leading run scorer, scored the fastest century in World Cup history (66 balls) and became the third person to score three centuries in a single World Cup.
Underlining his ability in the three formats of the game, Hayden then went to the inaugural World Twenty20 in South Africa in September 2008 and led the tournament run scorers once again.
