Vegemite and shrimps on the barbie

Matthew Hayden is more than a god-fearing (not to mention dog-fearing) bully of a batsman, he is also the most famous Australian chef since the galloping gourmet galloped off to the great kitchen in the sky. King Cricket has alerted me to this disturbing opus.

Somehow I missed the original Matthew Hayden Cookbook and I suspect that it might be hard to track down, at least in this country. Maybe it is big in Oz, the Delia Smith's Complete Cookery Course of every Sheila's kitchen cabinet?

I'm not sure what he is frazzling in the cover photo, possibly the pit bull that savaged him last week (bless it), but it seems that his speciality is ham and pumpkin soup, which he credited for giving him the energy to score 380 against Zimbabwe a couple of years back (who needs energy to do that? Geoff Boycott's famously talented grandmother could have scored a couple of hundreds against Zimbabwe without breaking sweat.)

England need to fight back against this extracurricular activity. Perhaps instead of bland biographies, we should demand such masterpieces as The Tao of Giles, Line Dancing the Andrew Strauss Way or Kevin Pietersen's Guide to Batik and other Crafts.