Hayden's power play

A key feature of the Super Eight matches in this World Cup has been the inability of the opening batsmen to get off to the kind of frenetic start that's become the norm in one-day cricket. Sixty runs in ten overs is often par for the course on flat, batsman-friendly tracks, but in this tournament, the trend has been entirely different: difficult pitches with seam and swing - and sometimes bounce - on offer has made the openers' lot an unenviable one. The latest instance of the openers' struggle was in evidence during West Indies' match against Bangladesh in Barbados on Thursday - despite having Chris Gayle in their ranks, West Indies limped to 17 for 2 after ten, which turned out to be only marginally worse than Bangladesh's 22 for 2 at a similar stage in their innings.

That game wasn't the exception either: in 22 Super Eight matches so far, the first ten overs has yielded an average run-rate of 3.61, at 25.98 runs per wicket. So, on an average, teams have been 36.1 runs for the loss of 1.4 wickets after ten overs, which is hardly a typical ten-over score.

The openers from all sides have struggled, except one: Australia's opening pair of Matthew Hayden and Adam Gilchrist have blasted the ball around as if these were the most batsman-friendly pitches. The table below shows how each team has fared in the first ten overs in the Super Eight games, and the difference between the Australians and the rest is gigantic, and goes a long way in explaining why Australia have completely dominated all the teams in the tournament so far. The table below also explains, to a large extent, why some of the other teams failed to make the cut - West Indies and England would both have fancied their chances of putting up a better show, but neither could recover from the repeated failures of their opening pairs.

Hayden and Gilchrist haven't come across Shane Bond yet, but they've handled the rest of the bowlers pretty comfortably, averaging 86.50 per partnership, with six fifty-plus stands in seven innings - the only exception was against West Indies, when Gilchrist fell for 7 with the score on 10. That was one of only two occasions when Australia have lost a wicket within the first ten overs - Gilchrist has fallen on both occasions, but Hayden has been absolutely impregnable: he has scored as quickly as Gilchrist without being dismissed even once during the first Powerplay.

After Hayden's disappointing series in England in 2005, many thought he'd disappear from the Australian one-day set-up. He did, for a while, but since coming back to the team in the DLF Cup in September 2006 he has been in irresistible form, scoring plenty of runs, and getting them quickly.

So prolific has Hayden been in the last eight months that his average is the highest among all batsmen who've scored at least 750 runs since 2006. In the World Cup so far, more than one fast bowler has been bludgeoned into submission by Hayden: he has scored at at least a run a ball against Shaun Pollock (33 from 16 balls), Farveez Maharoof (22 from 12), Charl Langeveldt (22 from 14), Andrew Hall (26 off 18) and Daren Powell (31 from 31). Three more such performances, and Australia will be favourites to complete a hat-trick of World Cup triumphs.