Obviously it was an exaggeration for effect, but people haven't generally taken Dravid's form slump to mean that he was anything other than a great batsman who is out of form, maybe even "past it". Rightly so of course, there's no reason it should reflect on past achievements. There's been various discussions about this, I'm sure you're aware of them so I won't bother digging one up.
As far as Hayden goes, well, take a look at your own posts for an example, though it's more the general tone of the discussion about Hayden, over a long period of time. When Hayden performs well, it's because he's been playing on flat pitches or against crap bowlers, or when he hasn't been playing against crap bowlers, he's been playing against good bowlers who for some reason were bowling poorly. When he performs badly, which of course is far less often, it's apparently a return to the norm.
The point of course is that many batsmen go through form slumps. What Hayden is doing now doesn't erase what he has done in the past, and the argument that he's a flat track bully because he failed on X occasion against quality pace bowling while ignoring the occasions he has succeeded is absurd. Dravid hasn't been presented with the same ridiculous argument, which was the point of my post.
Obviously what Hayden has done for the past 4 months doesn't change what happened in 6 of the previous 7 years (he had another year-long bout of lack of scoring between Augusts 2004 and 2005, of course), I've made precisely that point earlier this thread.
I don't think anyone's ever called Hayden not scoring "the norm" - the norm for his career from 2001/02 onwards has been scoring. To my mind, that scoring comprises pretty well exclusively of bashing weak seam-bowling on non-seaming pitches, but it's still the norm.
It's the success as much as the failures that defines Hayden as a flat-track (or more accurately non-seaming-track) bully to my mind. Not every time he's had a run of low scoring has been down to being worked-out, obviously, some of it's just been down to playing badly, but there's been enough of such instances - and sufficiently few of him scoring in challenging circumstances - in both his "former" (1993/94-2001) and "latter" (2001/02-2008/09) career parts to call him a non-seaming-track bully, AFAIC.
Similarly, if Hayden were to walk out tomorrow on an SCG minefield that seamed all over the place and score a flawless 156 it would do absolutely nothing to counter the claim that he was a flat-track bully between 2001/02 and 2004 and 2005/06 and 2007/08, precisely because the past is past. The tracks that he scored on and the tracks he did not (not that he scored on every non-seaming track he was presented with, obviously) are the same once what's happened has happened.
The only thing that Hayden scoring a flawless big innings on a seaming deck any time now would prove was that he
might have been able to do between 2001/02 and 2007/08 if given enough chances. But equally, he might not have.
My opinion on what has happened so far in Hayden's career is already formed, and nothing is going to change the past so therefore nothing is going to change my opinion.
