If there was one thing that was highly awful about Test cricket in the early 2000s, it was having to endure Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer opening the batting for Australia. Then they retired and how we rejoiced. Only now Test cricket is even worse because they’re still around and now they’re audible.

Matthew Hayden’s idiosyncratic verbal stylings have been documented on this website many a time. Hayden routinely starts one sentence only to finish an entirely different one, while his ability to add superfluous words to otherwise quite straightforward utterances is quite simply unparalleled.

Justin Langer, meanwhile, has an inexplicable attachment to the word ‘elite’ that is surpassed only by his inexpliable attachment to Matthew Hayden.

The World Test Championship final currently has both these men on commentary. (It also has another member of The Platinum Club, Ricky Ponting – who proves that it is actually entirely possible to be competent at both batting and speaking.)

Our commentary highlight so far came early and from Langer. Analysing Usman Khawaja’s 10-ball duck, he questioned the opener’s decision to walk out in a long-sleeved sweater.

Sleeves restrict your movement, you see. No physical feat has ever been achieved in sleeves.

If you’d come to this game after hearing it was a showcase for Test cricket, you could be forgiven for thinking that, in this respect at least, the format would be better left unshowcased.

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“It will be like two balls of mercury on the one plate,” according to Matthew Hayden.

Regular readers of this website will know that Hayden is currently serving as Pakistan’s batting coach and principle guff-talker. Justin Langer is of course Australia’s current head coach and principle guff-talker.

Way back when, they both opened the batting and talked guff for Australia.

Later this week, Pakistan will play Australia in the semi-final of the T20 World Cup. This means it’ll no longer be Hayden and Langer – it’ll be Hayden v Langer.

“There’s lots of relationships in cricket and when it comes to Thursday night, we’ll put our friendships down for three hours and we’ll get to business and should be good fun,” Langer told Cricinfo.

So that’s kind of what Hayden’s ‘balls of mercury on a plate’ comment is about. “They will always find a way of coming together,” he told the Courier Mail.

(A primary school teacher once allowed a friend of ours to spend a happy afternoon pushing mercury around a plate after someone dropped a thermometer. In its article I just broke a thermometer – what do I do? the website poison.org says, “DO NOT allow children to help you clean up the spill,” and, “Never allow children to play with thermometers or any other source of mercury.”)

This is a weird and colourful quote from Hayden and to be applauded really. However, he then immediately reverted to impenetrable nonsense.

In a series of increasingly disjointed sentences, he added: “My coaching style and my style in life is to have that connection. Once you step across that white line, it’s game on. But Justin and I don’t have to do that. I have never met a coach who has won a game of cricket.”

You can try and parse this for meaning if you want, but we’d argue that if meaning needs actively rooting out, it usually isn’t worth finding.

Speaking of which, we can’t help but close with Langer’s recent comments about David Warner’s fitness.

Kicking off with a bit of self parody before immediately highlighting the sheer meaninglessness of his own utterances, he said of the opener: “He is literally elite fit. He always is, but he’s at a different level at the moment.”

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One of the defining qualities of Matthew Hayden’s guff-talking is his habit of throwing in a load of additional words that add precisely nothing to what he is trying to say. We’re going to talk to you about three recent examples.

Last time around – back when Hayden first took on his coaching job with Pakistan – we highlighted another of the former Aussie opener’s verbal crimes – a tendency to start one sentence and confuse himself before ending a completely different sentence.

There was a very fine example of this in his recent interview with Cricinfo.

Speaking about Pakistan’s players taking on India’s, he said: “Your opportunity now becomes a very history-making opportunity. I sense that our players are ready for that opportunity, and I sense that there is a calmness around our group that wants us to be a successful competitor on the day.”

This isn’t even one of the quotes we want to talk about today, but this is just incredible stuff from start to finish. Hayden must be the first person in human history to have said, “Your opportunity now becomes a very history-making opportunity” – and that isn’t even the key line.

The key line is that second one; the one about a calmness that apparently feels emotions and harbours desires. This particular calmness wants multiple people to be one singular successful competitor.

Incredible.

Anyway, that’s just a quick wide-eyed marvel and not in fact today’s main thing.

Today’s main thing is the adding of extra words.

(Actually, just one more thing before we get to that. He also said that he’s been following Indian cricket closely before making the baffling claim that, “I more or less watch KL Rahul.” Matthew Hayden says he more or less watches KL Rahul. Anybody any ideas what that means? No?)

Extra words

Let’s keep things simple. What we’ll do is we’ll reproduce three Hayden quotes. Then we’ll follow each with a translation that’ll help you spot all the superfluous words that he jammed in there for no good reason whatsoever.

Exhibit A

Hayden points out that the two dominant captains during the IPL were MS Dhoni and Eoin Morgan, “even though their individual performances weren’t as good as what they have previously done within their own statistical record.”

He could instead have said that the two dominant captains during the IPL were MS Dhoni and Eoin Morgan, “even though their individual performances weren’t as good as in the past.”

Exhibit B

“Nothing else that I’ve ever seen throughout various elements of the game that I’ve been a part of ever matches the rivalry between India and Pakistan.”

He could instead have said: “Nothing that I’ve seen matches the rivalry between India and Pakistan.”

Exhibit C

“This (Pakistan) camp has got some wonderful assets that will perform on the day that are ready to perform.”

He could instead have said: “Pakistan have got some good players.”

If you sign up for the King Cricket email, we more or less keep an eye on Matthew Hayden and may write about him again even though we’ve been trying to stop doing so for about a decade now.

If you don’t know Indian yogi and author “Sadhguru” (Jaggi Vasudev), he’s kind of a big deal. The Isha Foundation that he set up in 1992 is said to have over nine million volunteers. A lot of people like Sadhguru. They think he’s wise. In August 2019, Sadhguru agreed to get on stage and talk to Matthew Hayden about stuff.

Hayden is not the first cricketer to do this kind of thing with Sadhguru. Sachin Tendulkar spoke to him in front of plenty of people in 2015 and he also did a thing with Virender Sehwag, during which the opener’s, “see ball, hit ball,” philosophy was rewritten as the slightly-less-catchy, “forget expectations, just hit the ball.”

So what arose from this timeless meeting with the creator of The Hayden Way?

In (a very long) conversation with the mystic

Okay, first of all we’ve got to level with you. Much as the prospect of watching the full 2h10m video appeals to us, we don’t need an internationally-renowned spiritualist to tell us that our time on this Earth is finite.

Spinal Tap and The Big Lebowski ain’t going to rewatch themselves and Smashtastic Cricket ain’t going to play itself. As such, we settled on watching a very short bit at the start before skipping around randomly.

One thing that we noticed very early on is that neither of them is very obviously the host.

We kind of thought Sadhguru would be running the thing, but it’s actually Hayden who starts things off by welcoming the yogi before providing, “the definition of Australia,” which is apparently, “the faces that we see in front of us.”

After that Sadhguru makes a lame joke about the title being “beyond boundaries,” thus further diminishing what was already a terrible and hackneyed play on words.

Then he does a really cool move. Just as you’re expecting him to ask some sort of specific question to get proceedings underway, he throws in a sudden “please” and unexpectedly cedes the floor to Hayden.

It’s a classic hospital pass. You should definitely throw in an open-ended “please” the next time you’re in a meeting.

Hayden flounders and says something about it being a beautiful occasion, “as it always is when you get a lot of people in a room.” (This is not a fact. We won’t resort to citing any specific wartime atrocities, but lots of people in a room is most definitely not a guarantee of a beautiful occasion.)

He eventually asks, “What force is dragging us all together?” and finally we’re sort of underway.

So what did Hayden say?

This website is not especially interested in what Sadhguru says because he is not an ex-cricketer who has concluded he is a public speaker on the basis that he has ‘cemented his communication skill sets’. We do however have to mention the moment where he uses a surfing analogy – “some people are crushed by the wave” – despite Hayden having once broken his spine when he got crushed by the wave while surfing.

Disappointingly, about 99.5% of the video is Sadhguru talking and Hayden mostly restricts himself to asking questions. (It turns out he is the host).

We did find a few nice additions to the Gospel According to Haydos though.

• “My first impressions of India is that there is a lot of people”
• “I like to cook and I know one thing about rice”
• “We can have a cook-off. Not a competition. Just an enrichment. An enrichment experience”
• “Trust me, at times I did feel like holding up Rahul Dravid by the belly and shaking him a little”
• “You might describe yourself as a platelet within the human body”

And it seems appropriate to finish with this one: “Australia is – correct me if I’m wrong – full of things that make no sense whatsoever.”

Thanks to The Smudge for pointing this out to us.

< 1 minute readWe’ve tried to give up writing about Matthew Hayden’s habit of talking a load of incomprehensible bollocks, but as the man himself says in a recent interview on Cricinfo: “Sometimes things are just meant to be, aren’t they? You just have to give in to the higher forces and say, ‘You know what, this is forever, and I don’t understand it. But so be it.'”

At the heart of the Hayden idiolect is the word ‘process’. For him, it means pretty much anything.

It can mean one shot.

“One of the things that I miss the most about cricket and batting in particular is that meditation of cricket, that involvement of myself – mind, body and spirit – to delivering that one specific process, which is to execute a cricket shot.”

Or it can mean all of the shots.

“That was very much in my overall psychology of trying to execute the base process of batting so that I was on the front foot rather than being on the back foot and reacting to conditions.”

And apparently it is also something you ‘live out’.

“Some of my best innings have been those that were less than 50 balls in duration because of the conditions. You won’t get the glory of 50 or 100 or 150 or 200, but you will get the inner peace of knowing that you committed to what the process was on the day, and that you were part of the process and you were living out that process.”

We’re slightly concerned that he’s becoming self aware though. At one point he asked whether ‘bowlsmanship’ was a word. Then again, in the very same sentence he referred to Bishan Bedi’s “thought process of tossing the ball in the air.”

< 1 minute readWe used to fear this kind of thing, but it’s all been put in perspective by this:

The holiday ends with you having a barbecue with the man himself. At least he’s a good cook.

“Yes, I could definitely eat a 14th steak if you’d be good enough to go back over to the barbecue yet again. There’s not enough heat left to cook with, you say? I’m sure there is. You’ll just have to cook it for longer. You’ll just have to cook it for much, much longer. That’s right. Stay over there, slightly further away from me for much, much longer.”

We found this via a link on Hayden’s Twitter feed, which read: “Come and play in my back yard.”

Not sure why we clicked it really. There was no possible good outcome.

< 1 minute readApparently Jimmy Anderson once hit Michael Clarke in the head with a pad because Clarke was being a knobhead. It’s a slightly disappointing story overall, but made faintly interesting by the subplots revolving around Damien Martyn.

Apparently, Jimmy was sitting in the changing rooms and Michael Clarke was giving off some sort of ill-defined arrogant vibe. Anderson told Martyn that he wanted to wrap a pad round the back of his head. Martyn told him to do it.

“I looked at him again as if to ask: ‘Are you sure?’

“‘Do it!’ he repeated.

“As I’d had a couple of beers, I didn’t need a second invitation.”

That sounds rather like he did need a second invitation to us, but whatever. Jimmy applied pad to head; people swore; nothing much happened.

However, clearly feeling like he was playing a blinder, it seems Damien Martyn later managed to get himself in some sort of argument with Matthew Hayden.

This seems fair enough to us, except for the fact that Hayden delivered the most outlandish insult we’ve ever heard – he called Martyn “the biggest wanker on the planet”.

Now, we could sort of forgive the error if someone else had said the same thing. But if you yourself are the biggest wanker on the planet, you KNOW the inaccuracy of what you are saying.

The gall of the man.

< 1 minute readIn 2006, we started writing about how Matthew Hayden spoke bollocks. At that point, his batting drew most people’s attention and it hadn’t been widely acknowledged that the man was sucking all meaning out of words and then piling them together arbitrarily. Now everyone has noticed.

Even Michael Atherton’s slagging him off for talking nonsense now, so in many ways our work is done. The world is well-equipped to mock Hayden’s cod-business guff-talking without us.

And yet we’ve continued. Every time that we feel like we’re out, he pulls us back in. The man’s retired, so he should no longer be a target, but there he is evaluating Phil Hughes or launching The Hayden Way. Sometimes it’s just too easy.

Our latest article for Cricinfo comes as a result of Hayden investing in the Big Bash League. It has to be the last thing we do about Matthew Hayden, but we fear it won’t be. It says it all that Cricinfo usually add a disclaimer about all quotes being made-up, but it wasn’t necessary in this instance, because we used genuine quotes. The man is officially a self-parody.

Read it here.

< 1 minute readEven now, people often ask us to write about Matthew Hayden. We never do.

Partly it’s that Hayden has retired and is therefore no longer ‘a target’. Mostly it’s just that we don’t like doing what people ask us to do.

With that in mind, we’d like to emphasise that our recent Cricinfo Ashes piece featuring Hayden was NOT written to please anyone.

That said, it’s gone down amazingly well in the comments section, with one person saying that Alan Tyers is merely 10 times better than us. Another, who really seems to like it, describes us as being ‘almost as good as Andrew Hughes’.

< 1 minute readWatson thought the changing room stank and lit a scented candle. Andrew Symonds gave him shit for it.

Andrew Symonds comes out of this well; Shane Watson less so.

This tale comes from Matthew Hayden’s autobiography.

We hope we get a review copy. Buying Matthew Hayden’s autobiography would effectively mean giving him money and that would amount to tacit approval of the man.