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40 is the new 50: Why form can't be measured the Hayden way

12th December, 2018
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12th December, 2018
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“We pick too many mediocre batsmen. Back in the day, Matty Hayden had to peel off thousand-run Shield season after thousand-run Shield season and average north of fifty just to get a look in.”

It’s a commonly expressed sentiment in the daily rounds of drop-this-bloke-in-favour-of-this-other-bloke that dominate discussions around the Australian top order.

There’s unquestionable truth in both Hayden’s prolific but often unrewarded situation back in the mid-1990s and the quality of the side he was trying to break into.

But there is also often-overlooked detail in the Hayden scenario back in the day that is almost impossible to apply to the Australian summer of cricket 25 years on, and that is that the modern Australian cricket schedule looks nothing like it did back then.

The obvious difference is the two-month gap in the middle of the summer where Twenty20 cricket takes over.

Hayden didn’t have to worry about that back in the day; he played Shield games interlaced with state one-dayers most weeks from October to March.

Hayden first played Sheffield Shield cricket for Queensland in the summer of 1991-92.

His first three seasons saw him go past 1000 runs for the summer, and he fell only 46 short in the fourth season too.

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The third of those 1000-run seasons was his extraordinary 1993-94 summer, in which he peeled off 1136 runs in just six Shield games. Average: 126.22!

In Hayden’s first five Shield seasons he amassed 5119 runs in 99 innings across 54 matches. And by the end of the 1995-96 season he’d played just one of his 103 Tests.

The big takeaway for me in pulling out the big Queensland opener’s numbers is the innings and match tallies. In three of those five seasons he batted 21, 26 and 23 times for the Bulls in their Shield campaign alone.

That just can’t happen these days. For one thing, even if they play in the Shield final on top of every game scheduled, your average state player in Australia can play a maximum of 11 games. And four states will play only ten.

If Joe Burns or Matt Renshaw or Glenn Maxwell wants to force his way into the Test side through weight of Shield runs, at the start of the season there’s a maximum of 20 opportunities to bat. In Maxwell’s case Victoria have batted twice in only four of their six games this summer already.

And in one of those games they only lost two wickets in a small run chase. At most, Maxwell will now bat only 17 times for the Vic this summer.

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Except that it’s less than that because Maxwell has in actual fact played only the last two of those six Shield games Victoria has already played by virtue of being involved with the Australian limited-overs series against Pakistan, South Africa and India.

Glenn Maxwell Cricket Australia 2017

(AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi)

Now, limited overs internationals were played back in Hayden’s early days, but not nearly as many as are played every year now, and there were no Twenty20 internationals at all.

In 2000-01 and 2001-02, as he was starting to establish himself in the Test side, Hayden still played around ten Shield games for Queensland.

Usman Khawaja has played just one Shield game for Queensland this season and played only three times last year.

So while it would be great to have blokes peeling off 1000-run Shield seasons again, the reality of the schedule makes that less and less likely.

And the obvious by-product there is that that old yardstick really can’t be used any more.

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A look at last season’s Shield numbers shows three of the top ten run-scorers averaging less than 40 and another three averaging below 45.

Only three batsmen in the top 20 run-scorers – Burns, Maxwell, and forgotten former Victorian captain Cameron White – averaged better than 50 and only five made more than 750 runs for the season, with Renshaw’s 804 the only tally within 200 of the old Hayden standard.

On that front it’s somewhat encouraging to note that after the first six Shield rounds this summer 12 batsmen have topped 400 runs, three of whom have gone past 500.

Two of those 12 – Marcus Harris and Shaun Marsh – are in the Test side, while Peter Handscomb’s 361 runs place him 13th.

Only two of those 13 average less than 40 this summer, but only three average more than 50.

Justin Langer and Matt Hayden

(Photo by Hamish Blair/Getty Images)

But with the Big Bash League set to take over from next Wednesday night, Shield form is going to become less and less and relevant the further the summer gets on.

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The quick turnaround between the first two and then the last two Tests against India means changes to the batting order are unlikely to be anything other than injury-forced.

And come the two Tests against Sri Lanka in late January and early February, what weight will Shield runs in November carry?

This is why coaches have to trot out the line oft-bemoaned that the player in question is “hitting them all right” against the white ball or in the nets.

With the Australian summer now sliced and diced in more directions than previously thought possible, actual measures like season averages and run tallies have to make way for subjective observations around ball-striking.

Form as we know it becomes much harder to judge by any tangible degree.

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The players know this too. Just on Wednesday, while being unveiled as the Melbourne Stars skipper for BBL08, Maxwell himself admitted, “I suppose being a middle-order batsman in Twenty20 cricket, it’s probably harder to get picked [for the Test side] on your white-ball form.

“If things go my way and there’s injuries and stuff like that, I’ll be more than happy to take the position, but it looks fairly unlikely,” he said, rather matter-of-factly.

It’s not ideal and it’s a long way from perfect, but what methods you might choose to judge players by is essentially the same as team selection nowadays: a very, very inexact science.

The changing Australian cricket landscape means what we once thought was normal is now extraordinary.

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