Lives in Cricket No 8 - Ernest Hayes

The harshest criticism levelled against his batting is that he begins to hit before he has got his eye in. We hear a great deal about this when a batsman fails at what he is best at. When W.W.Read got out through attempting the pull shot, he was told that the pull was spoiling his game. When ‘Ranji’ got out lbw through attempting to leg-glance, we hear sermons on the folly of the stroke. And yet every batsman must get out some time, and he is generally attempting some kind of stroke when beaten. When Hayes flicks at the first off ball and retires caught at slip, his lack of restraint is made much of. But let him get his first off ball past third man for four, pull-drive the next two from the middle stump to the long-on boundary, and go on getting ‘em for the next hour or two, and his early hitting is not called lack of restraint. It is called brilliant forcing cricket, and other batsmen are recommended to try the same methods instead of taking half a day to play themselves in. Hayes is an audacious batsman and sometimes he pays for his audacity. He sometimes makes his shots at balls as wide as to invite disaster: he oft-times attempts to hit straight good length balls to square-leg and there is more than a suspicion of slash about his game. There is nothing very polished about his strokes. His drives do not flow in rhythmical curves. They are sheer blows quick and sudden. He is seldom guilty of the forward push strokes . . . he does not worry about his average. He might not have worried about his average, but he was certainly aware of it, recording it faithfully in his scrapbook in most seasons, along with details of his centuries, but the question must be asked as to how a man so successful at county level was a relative failure on the international scene. It is a question that has been asked of others, in more recent times, perhaps most memorably Graeme Hick and Mark Ramprakash, and some of the answers may be the same. For a start there is the question of temperament, though there is nothing to suggest that Hayes was prone to ‘freeze’ or was a victim of stage-fright. He certainly was unlucky with injuries and illness in South Africa in 1904/05 and was never given an opportunity in Australia in 1907/08. Newcomers rarely shine in a losing side and the teams he accompanied to the southern hemisphere were 66 Failure in Australia, Success at Home