Haddin to join Clarke in retirement

MELBOURNE: Australia vice-captain Brad Haddin revealed he will be joining the captain Michael Clarke in ODI retirement amidst raucous celebrations of the team’s World Cup final victory over New Zealand in Melbourne.
At the same time Haddin spoke freely about the mindset that led to numerous instances of harsh behaviour towards the New Zealand players.
In an interview with Triple M soon after the sun rose over Melbourne, Haddin said New Zealand’s sheer niceness during their group-stage meeting in Auckland had made the more combative Australian team uncomfortable. This in itself did not seem surprising, given the high pitch of aggression they have played at since they regained the Ashes in a one-sided but occasionally fiery 2013-14 home Test series against England.
“You know what? They deserved it,” Haddin said of New Zealand’s batsmen being the subject of several send-offs. “They were that nice to us in New Zealand and we were that uncomfortable. I said in the team meeting: ‘I can’t stand for this anymore, we’re going at them as hard as we can.’
“It was that uncomfortable. All they were was that nice to us for seven days. I said, ‘I’m not playing cricket like this. If we get another crack at these guys in the final I’m letting everything [out].’ I’m not playing another one-day game, so they can suspend me for as long as they like.”
Haddin’s contribution to the final did not merely take the form of boorish send-offs and encouragement to other teammates to do the same.
He engaged in a rather more subtle psychological joust with Brendon McCullum in the first over of the match, encouraging New Zealand’s captain to go hard at the ball in the knowledge Mitchell Starc had been honing his yorker for the occasion.
“I think I ran down the second ball, didn’t I? I certainly wasn’t tentative,” McCullum had said. “Hadds actually asked me before the first ball, he said, ‘are you still going to have a crack today’, and I said, ‘too right I am’.”