Matthew Hayden

Strength was Matthew Hayden's strength - both mental and physical. Tall, powerful and intimidating at the crease, he was also equipped with concentration that owed in part to his love for fishing and surfing.

Hayden shrugged off early-career criticism that he was technically too limited for Test cricket because of the way he played around his front pad. His six-year partnership with Justin Langer at the top of Australia's Test order made for the second most successful opening Test combination of them all.

Eleven of Hayden's first 12 Tests were against South Africa and West Indies, a trial for any opener; he made a hundred in the third of those. A different sort of challenge faced him on the tour of India in 2001, where he unveiled his great weapon, the slog-sweep, to the tune of 549 runs. That year he amassed an Australian-record 1391 runs, a mark he got close to again in 2003 and 2005, in each of which years he went past 1300. At the tail end of 2001 and into 2002, he reeled off four hundreds back to back in as many Tests against South Africa, home and away, in series Australia won 3-0 and 2-1, underlining his role as the team's brutal cudgel during their early-21st-century heyday under Steve Waugh.

He came good in the one-day arena too, scoring prolifically on the ODI leg of that 2001 India tour, and by the time the 2003 World Cup rolled around, he was ranked among the top three batters in both international formats.

Later that year he hammered 380 against Zimbabwe in Perth, briefly taking the record for the highest Test score from Brian Lara, and in the middle of the following year he battered Sri Lanka for twin centuries in Cairns that took his tally to 20 hundreds in only 55 Tests.

Hayden experienced a slump in 2004, extending into the famous Ashes series of the following year, though he produced 138 in the last Test, at The Oval, and followed it with another three hundreds in a row, becoming the third batter after Don Bradman and Ken Barrington to score four centuries back to back twice.

Hayden won back his place in the ODI side, lost in 2005, early in 2007, and cemented it when, in the final match of the Chappell-Hadlee series, he thumped an Australian-record 181 off 166 balls. More muscle was on display at the ODI World Cup in the West Indies, where he was the top run-scorer, with 659 at an average of 73.22 - despite a fractured toe, and a broken bone in his other foot, he later revealed. A domineering 66-ball hundred against South Africa, one of three centuries he made in that tournament, earned him honorary citizenship of St Kitts.

A natural fit for the IPL, Hayden spent three years with Chennai Super Kings, making a table-topping 572 runs for them in 2009. He did rather less well the following year, his last in the league, but CSK won the title.