The country boy who found himself on top of the world

Matthew Hayden interview: It's been a long haul, but the journey from the bush to best batsman on the planet is complete. Stephen Brenkley speaks to a fulfilled man

Matthew Hayden is the best batsman in the world. The ratings say it, his captain asserts it, the runs confirm it, England might presently discover it. For 18 months, Hayden has cut a swathe through bowlers as though he was scything down corn back on the family farm.

He is a man in command of the game. No doubt the game will be ready to get its own back – it usually does – but the day does not look imminent. "Momentum is everything in cricket," he said. "It's a great lesson to anyone coming up that really the game doesn't earmark you. You do get people like Lara and Tendulkar who are earmarked for greatness, but the quiet achievers tend to gather strength over time.

"I don't really know what it is. You can't really put it down to a technical thing, it's more of a mental battle that international cricket presents. Eventually, I've won it, but it took other people time to realise it as well." It was astonishing to learn last week that in a poll of 140 international players, the left-handed opener did not feature in the top four batsmen. This probably proves both that players don't know it all after all, and that bowlers are prone to self-denial. It also shows how swiftly Hayden's star has risen.

This is his third coming as an Australian player, and during it his Test batting average has risen from 24 to 50. In 2001, in 25 innings he scored 1,391 Test runs, including five hundreds, more than any Australian has managed in one year, and fewer only than Viv Richards and Sunil Gavaskar.

This year, so far, he has made 681 in 11 innings, with three centuries. He is making a century on every four visits to the crease. His one-day average is 40. Not only that, but he has formed a formidable opening partnership with Justin Langer. They have already shared five double-century stands, more than any pairing in history, and only Hobbs and Sutcliffe average more between them.

The Ashes are his (indeed, their) next target. The feeling is that he owes England one after a bewilderingly indifferent series in England in the middle of his annus mirabilis. Had he played as he did either side of that rubber, all records would have been smashed to smithereens.

When Hayden won the Allan Border Medal last January for being the Australian player of the year, the team's captain, Steve Waugh, was moved to say: "He's playing as well as anybody's probably ever played the game. I can't imagine anybody playing even better than him." Pushed at that point to say whether that assessment embraced Bradman, Waugh said: "I didn't see him play, so, probably excluding The Don."

Waugh is not given to wild exaggeration. He repeated his analysis last week in Sharjah after Australia completed their three-match destruction of Pakistan. Hayden, he said, was the best opener in the world, and immediately revised the opinion. No, he was the best batsman. You can see what he means: Hayden drives down the ground, he cuts, pulls and hooks ferociously, he climbs into the new ball and he takes on the spinners. Sometimes lately, there has been no safe place to bowl at him.

Hayden is a man plainly at ease with himself. He is tall (at 6ft 2in, very tall for an international batsman). Many, if not most, of the outstanding batsmen could seek alternative careers as jockeys; Hayden looks as though he could carry the horses. He is guardsman-straight, the muscles ripple in his upper body and burst out of his shirts. The quiet outer strength appears to be matched by a resolute inner core. He could be John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

The world's best batsman was brought up on a farm three hours' drive west of Brisbane. His mother was a teacher. Matthew played back-yard cricket with his older brother. They never saw cricket on the television. It was the Hayden Boys on their own in the outback. "It was a very deep-seated love or our competitive nature that kept us going. We're both country boys who also share a passion for the ocean."

The Haydens still dwell well outside conventional urban society. While his brother is in "the wilds of northern Queensland", Matthew, his wife, Kellie, and their daughter of four months, Grace, live on the tiny island of North Stradbroke. It is only half an hour by boat from Brisbane, but it is another world.

"Not many people in Brisbane know too much about it, although it's on their doorstep," he said. "I was brought up in the country, but every holiday and any time we had off we'd be at the coast for surfing and fishing. I surfed all the time and if I wasn't surfing I was fishing. I still am. I do all kinds of fishing: fly, sea, coarse, anything. I take my rods on tour.

"About 3,000 people live on our island. I live in a place called Amity Point, a whale- reserve area. It's a 10-kilometre walk from our place on the tip of the island along the beach to Point Lookout, and I'll do that walk three or four times a week. I'll surf, go to the gym, ride back like a circuit, and all I'll see is two or three people on that beach. It's unbelievable. There are no phones and my mobile's got no bloody reception."

It does not take much of the amateur psychologist to deduce that Hayden has probably built up his vast reserves of concentration and mental resolve from long, solitary, isolated hours. As he spoke of his beach sojourns and his fishing trips it was an easy step to envisage a man communing with nature and his soul. The same bloke who is about to plunder England's finest to all parts, assuming they can limp as far as the popping crease.

Hayden first played a Test match in 1994 when Mark Taylor pulled out with a severe stomach ailment 20 minutes before the start of a match against South Africa. "I didn't even have my whites," he remembers now. He was never about to keep his place, which 20 runs in the match saw to, and he had to wait three years for another go – this time, when Matthew Elliott was injured – despite a slightly more extensive run in the one-day side.

A hundred in the second match of his first recall was a false portent. He could not nail Test cricket down. If it rankles still, he does not quite say so. "I didn't really know my game well enough. Maybe I didn't make the most of the opportunity. Mark Taylor was captain of Australia. He was a left-handed opening batsman, so he's not going to say: 'Matty, here's your free run', so what am I going to do?"

Hayden was always convinced that he would get another go after that second rejection by the selectors. It helped that Steve Waugh (or Stephen, as his team-mates refer to him) supported him. "He's been a remarkable believer of mine even when I was not on contract or even on the fringe of the team."

Hayden kept piling up runs in the Sheffield Shield. Maybe we should have known what was to come: he made a hundred on debut, and is the only Aussie to have made 1,000 runs in his first season. He rampaged across England for three seasons with Hampshire and Northamptonshire, he played club cricket if necessary (he still does). He was recalled to the one-day side first, and on the same tour of New Zealand made it back to the Test side.

This time it was his time. Hayden not only had the shots by now, he had also found self-belief. "One thing I'm really proud of in my career," he says, "is that I've always gone back and done really well at the next level, the bottom level if necessary, and I've developed my game as I've gone along like that. I've never made excuses for being dropped, never had a chip on my shoulder, always gone back, worked really hard on what I thought I could improve on.

"When you first start playing you just play because that's all you've got to go on, then you probably complicate it for yourself by putting your game under scrutiny to try to improve. Then you get to a point where you've had enough of that and just start playing again. That was the point I had reached in 2000. Within myself I knew I had turned a corner, and I think everyone else knew it as well. They were waiting for me to do well, not to fail. I knew I was going to do well."

Hayden all but invested those words with an aura of mysticism. Must be the island air. He clung to it even when the first matches of his comeback did not quite work out. He was playing well, but a couple of errant shots and a couple of run-outs impeded him. Then came the tour of India. There was some speculation that he might not go. His family wondered.

India in 2001 transformed things forever. His success there was phenomenal, though Australia lost a truly sensational series, but it was born of his investment three years earlier. It is a story that enshrines the Hayden ethos. In 1997 he was out of national favour but he begged (his word) the selectors to grant him a place at the Indian spin academy in Madras.

In those few weeks he learned how to be comfortable against spin, where to hit the ball and where spinners might be trying to coerce batsmen to hit it. He made 119, 28 not out, 97, 67 and 203 in the three Test matches.

In England later in the year, his form slipped. He now thinks it was because he did not adapt in time to different conditions. "In the subcontinent you tend to use your wrists and hit across the line a lot more, in England I was probably going a bit hard at things and getting away from my game plan. When I got back to Australia I worked very hard at pacing again, I came back and got a hundred in club cricket not by smashing it, but by seeing off the new ball in defence, and expanding through the innings." Another lesson that embodies him.

What the 2001 tour of England did give him was his new opening partner, Langer. They played their first match together at The Oval when Michael Slater was dropped and they put on 158. They have never looked back, and for Slater there is surely no way back.

"Yeah, we've shared some enormous partnerships together. We have got very similar backgrounds but we have got different characters and different games, which makes the partnership work, although we're both left-handers, which is a new thing in Test cricket. I think we love our country, we share a lot of the same values. Batting with Slats was enjoyable but it was like batting on a knife edge at times, which is why everyone loves him. When Alfie [Langer] and I came together we were both on top of our games mentally as much as anything else.

"We don't really need to talk about it, we've been playing a similar time and we've forged a partnership and friendship over those years. We've sat on the bench plenty of times together as well, but we've done the hard yards then as well. Our characters are now almost welded together. In some ways we're fairly similar, fairly aggressive, competitive, share a great family life. His wife and my wife are good mates. He's a lot busier than me. I'll try to smell the roses a lot more." A man at ease with himself. A man who, unfortunately for England, will not be spending the next three months smelling roses.

Biography: Matthew Lawrence Hayden

Born: 29 October 1971 in Kingaroy, Queensland.

Represented: Hampshire, North-amptonshire, Queensland, Australia.

Role: Left-hand batsman, bowls occasional right-arm medium.

Test debut: v South Africa in Johannesburg, First Test 1993-94 (SA won by 197 runs).

Test statistics: Matches 33. Batting: innings 56; runs 2,600; highest score 203; average 50.0; 100s 9; 50s 10. Bowling: 9-0-40-0. Has claimed 29 catches.

ODI debut: v England in Manchester 1993 (c Stewart b Lewis 29).

ODI statistics: Matches 45. Batting: innings 42; runs 1,500; highest score 146; average 41.66; 100s 2; 50s 11. Bowling: 1-0-18-0. Taken 18 catches.