Career Summary and Peak
Hayden's career can be split into 4 parts, as has been summarised above. From his lame debut until the end of the South African tour in 1997 he played 13 Tests and averaged a shade above 24.
With his comeback into the side in 2001, started the most successful phase of his career. From the start of the 2001 tour of India until the completion of Sri Lanka's tour of Australia in mid-2004, Hayden scored 4523 runs in 42 Tests, scoring a century at an astonishing rate of one in every 3.8 innings. He was comfortably the world's best batsman during these three years, outscoring the next placed Brian Lara by more than 800 runs, had scored 6 more centuries than the next placed Ricky Ponting, and averaged only below Jacques Kallis (70.11).
From July 2004 onwards until the culmination of the Ashes, Hayden was just a pale shadow of his otherwise dominant self. In the 16 Tests he played during this phase, he scored only 837 runs at a humble average of 30.07, and for a man used to reeling off Test hundreds for fun, he didn't register a hundred for 30 innings!
After his failure in the first 4 Ashes Tests, Hayden's place in the side was in serious jeopardy with selectors explicitly stating that a failure in the 5th Test at the Oval would mean curtains to Hayden's career. Hayden responded with a gutsy 138 in the first innings, and although Australia did not win that game, Hayden lived on to see another day.
From then on till his last test, he played 32 Tests, scoring almost 3000 runs at an average of just under 50, scoring another 10 centuries.
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