Hayden versus the hapless bowlers

Three weeks into the IPL, and Matthew Hayden continues to hog the IPL limelight. While some of his other Australian mates have been told by their board to rest before tougher challenges later in the season, and others have performed only intermittently, Hayden has notched up scores of 44, 65, 57, 49, 1, 30, 43, 89 and 48 in nine matches so far. To understand how far he has towered over the rest of the batsmen, you only need to look at the stats for highest run-scorers in IPL 2009: Hayden leads with 426, and in second place is Suresh Raina, who has played the same number of innings but has scored 117 fewer runs.

Hayden has handled both pace and spin pretty well in the tournament so far, but clearly he has shown a preference for the ball coming on to the bat: both seamers and spinners have dismissed him four times each (he's been run-out once), but against pace he has scored at a much faster clip - 307 runs in 177 balls at an average of almost 77. Spinners have reined him in far more successfully, going for 119 runs in 104 balls, at an average of less than 30 runs-per-wicket. Clearly, Shane Warne knew what he was doing when he handed Yusuf Pathan the ball to open the attack against Chennai, and it's a ploy other teams will probably employ against him as well.

In the four matches he played in the last IPL, he had a better time against spin, scoring 34 off 26 balls without being dismissed once. That's another indication that conditions have been more favourable for spinners this time in South Africa.

Among bowlers who've bowled at least ten balls to Hayden in this IPL, Sreesanth has been the most expensive, going at more than ten per over. Clearly, he meant it when he called Sreesanth an over-rated bowler after the match against Punjab.

Yusuf Pathan has done well against him despite bowling with the new ball with fielding restrictions in place: in 17 balls he has only conceded 18 and dismissed Hayden once. Harbhajan Singh, another offspinner, has handled the Hayden challenge well too.

As was indicated last time, the Australian batsmen have continued to fare well, with the average runs-per-wicket and runs-per-over higher than the overall tournament average. Despite only 14 Australians having batted in the tournament so far, they've still managed more than 15% of the total runs scored off the bat.

The bowlers haven't had as much success, though, with 30 wickets at an average and economy rate slightly poorer than the tournament average.

Apart from Hayden, Brad Hodge is the other Australian batsman whose performance has improved significantly in the last few games - he has scored 240 in six games and is fast catching up on Gilchrist's tally of 255. Gilchrist's form has in fact fallen away somewhat recently - in the last five innings he has scored 92. Lee Carseldine has done well too in the few opportunities he has got, but the significant late entry into the IPL has been Andrew Symonds - in his first innings of the tournament he scored an unbeaten 60 off 36 balls. If he continues this form, he could be the next big Australian performer.

Among the bowlers, Warne remains the highest wicket-taker, with Dirk Nannes following him closely. The major late entry here was Brett Lee, who showed good rhythm in his debut game, taking 1 for 24 against Deccan Chargers.