Boy wonder who never admitted defeat

PHILLIP Hughes was a precociously talented cricketer whose dogged determination won a nation’s heart.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - OCTOBER 26: Phil Hughes of Australia looks on during Day Five of the First Test between Pakistan and Australia at Dubai International Stadium on October 26, 2014 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

MICHAEL Clarke was on the phone; Phillip Hughes was at the crease.

Wherever he went, he won friends with his sly charms. The death of any cricketer rocks the people in the game but the death of Hughes has been more disturbing because he was so deeply loved.

“Your mate’s 63 not out,” I said. “Looks like he might be up for your spot in the Test.”

Clarke, who was wrestling injury and perceptions and dramas that seemed so momentous at the time, was delighted. It was, at least, some good news in what had been a tough couple of weeks for the Australian captain and you could hear his voice relaxing as he processed his mate’s good fortune.

Then Hughes was on the ground and the cricket world tilted on its axis. All balance was lost in that moment and has failed to be restored since. Players and the cricket community are staggering and disoriented by grief.

Phillip Joel Hughes remains 63no and one of the most exciting talents to enter and exit Australian cricket. He would have turned 26 on Sunday, would probably have been part of the flight of cricketers migrating toward Brisbane on that day. But there are no birthday cakes, fairytales or happy endings.

A young man is dead and the shock waves from the brutality of that fact aren’t done yet.

Hughes’s death is a tragedy with endless dimensions. Killed playing the game he loved, he was surrounded by friends when he fell to the ground and was surrounded by them and family ever since.

Over the past few days, possibly 100 players have gathered around Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. Test players, past and present, and colleagues from state cricket have sat round his bed, held his hand and told stories as if they were in a change room, not a hospital room.

Sometimes they laughed, but mostly there have been tears, bitten lips and gulps for air.

Clarke has never been too far from Hughes’s side and the captain summoned every bit of his strength to read out the statement from the family a few hours after his mate died. Doctor Peter Brukner said Hughes was like a “little brother” to the Australian captain. He was a brother to so many of his teammates.

Ricky Ponting was there yesterday, Peter Siddle, George Bailey, Matthew Wade, Brad Haddin, Shane Watson, Justin Langer …

Hughes was a man whose subtle charisma was as large as his talents. His cheeky grin and sly asides were constant in the assortment of hotels and cricket grounds where players spend most of their lives.

He had country charm. The son of Greg and Virginia, he was raised on a banana farm in Macksville, halfway between Brisbane and Sydney, with his siblings, Megan and Jason. The young batsman had to leave that life and move to Sydney as a teenager to pursue his cricket dream.

“Cricket was Phillip’s life,” his family said in the statement read by the shattered Clarke yesterday.

“It’s a real-life tragedy,” added Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland. “We are completely devastated.”

Macksville remained his home long after he’d left. In South Africa earlier this year he spoke with passion about the cattle he had invested in with his father, and said he planned to move back when he finished cricket to take up farming full-time.

If there was one thing he loved as much, if not more than, cricket it was his cattle. Hughes also loved the bright lights and the bling, but the city wasn’t for him.

He remained close to his family too. Whenever things got tough he raced back to the bush for the restorative warmth of their company. His grandfather died a few months back and Hughes had to skip a game with Australia A to attend the funeral and comfort his father.

When he got back to cricket, he promised his dad that he would do something special to honour his grandfather’s life. They weren’t empty words.

In the next game, he became the only Australian batsman to score a double century. His father comforted himself this week with the knowledge that Phil died doing something he loved.

As a teenager, Hughes bought an apartment at Breakfast Point in Sydney’s inner west and brother Jason moved in to keep him company. Their small flat was filled with cricket gear: bats and bags, pads and gloves and helmets took up every corner of the room.

Batting coach Neil d’Costa had groomed Clarke for Test cricket and Hughes was his next protege. “The kid will go all the way,” he predicted.

The kid went places faster than anybody could imagine. Diminutive and barely out of school, he broke the hearts of grade bowlers who thought they could cut him down to size. Hughes gravitated to leg side at the crease: it was counterintuitive to everything anyone tells you about batting. The first movement is supposed to be toward middle and off. Hughes’s strange positioning and wonderful eye allowed him to plunder runs at will on the off side.

Balls that others would flick onto leg, he smashed through point. Bowlers had their lines and intelligence tested and came up lacking on every occasion.

At 18, he was playing Sheffield Shield cricket for the Blues under captain Simon Katich, who instantly adopted the precious young batsman. At 19, he became the youngest batsman to make a century in a Sheffield Shield final.

His mother’s Italian heritage was obvious in his stubble, dark eyes and aquiline nose. Katich promised that soon there would be two wogs opening for Australia and soon enough there were.

It’s hard to exaggerate the excitement that surrounded Hughes’s debut at the age of 20.

He had done enough in his first 16 Shield games to prove himself, but when Matthew Hayden retired at the end of the 2008-09 summer there were thoughts that Phil Jaques should resume his place as an opener for Australia.

The last Sheffield Shield game before the selection for the tour was held in Newcastle and would decide the matter. Hughes made 152 in the first innings and 81no in the second. He caught the plane to South Africa in February 2009, ready to take his place in a side captained by Ponting.

Before the game, he and Katich spoke. The kid wasn’t fond of fielding at short leg; the senior batsman wasn’t keen about facing the first delivery. So they made a pact and when Dale Steyn marked out his run-up beneath a steamy Johannesburg sky, the 20-year-old was waiting.

That first innings was a screaming anticlimax. The tabloids that had dubbed him Boy Wonder changed it to Boy Blunder. The fourth ball of the over was so short that by the time it got to him Hughes almost needed a step ladder to reach it: even then he only managed a nick through to the keeper. It was an audacious shot but not as audacious as the pair of sixes that took him to his first Test century in the next match, at Durban. Katich was at the other end on 50-odd and over the moon with the way things had panned out for his mate, who was out on 115.

Timeline

In the next innings, Hughes went to 160 and on the way became the youngest batsman in the history of the game to have a pair of centuries in one Test match.

There was a hell of a party in Durban that night (the Australians had won the series). Hughes bunkered down over some drink or other, the world at his feet and the future certain. Was there any limit to what he could achieve? Nobody thought there was.

Test cricket looked to have come easily to the batsman, but those looks were deceiving. England found him out in the following Ashes series and he lost his place.

Over the next five years, Hughes was in and out of the Test side, but no matter how many times people thought he would have his cards marked “never to be selected again”, he bounced back. The thing with the kid was he lived and breathed cricket, and would do anything to make it back.

Clarke said in August that he didn’t know anybody who wanted it more than Hughes.

Langer detected that when he was his batting coach and subscribed to the fan club. Hayden was there too. Katich had always been there. Ponting shares a similar sentiment and respect.

There is nobody at the elite level of the game in Australia who didn’t respect Hughes, but when you win the unquestioning admiration of men such as Langer, Hayden, Clarke, Katich and Ponting, you have won the respect of men who placed the highest value on character and commitment.

He rejected the folly of T20 to concentrate on the real stuff. He spent winters on the county circuit and uprooted himself again, moving from Sydney to Adelaide in the belief that he could truly focus on his game there.

But while he was primarily seen as a long-form batsman, Hughes proved he had more than one trick by making a century in his one-day international debut against Sri Lanka at the MCG last year. In the middle of the year — batting to honour his grandfather — he became the first Australian batsman to make a double century in a one-day match, scoring 202no against South Africa for Australia A.

Wherever he went, he won friends with his sly charms. The death of any cricketer rocks the people in the game but the death of Hughes has been more disturbing because he was so deeply loved.

Almost a permanent 12th man on recent tours, he was at the centre of the Australian side’s social life. Where many have been worn down by the frustration of travelling but never playing, he stayed cheerful and positive. Hughes was at the centre of almost every ¬meeting for coffee or dinner on the long, empty days spent in international locations between games.

In the United Arab Emirates he had the character to say he didn’t want a place in the side if it was at the expense of Alex Doolan, because it wouldn’t be fair on his mate. He had the determination, however, to do everything in his power to be recalled to the side.

As the second Test slipped away, a group of the players were drinking quietly to ease the pain but Hughes ordered a decaf coffee. “I know, I know,” he said with an apologetic grin. “It’s not even coffee, it’s just crap-flavoured milk …”

Hughes wasn’t leaving any stone unturned when it came to preparing himself for the possibility of making more runs and if that meant drinking “crap-flavoured milk” while everyone else had a beer, then so be it. He wore his hair shirt with a grin.

Selectors had earmarked him as the replacement for Chris Rogers when the senior opener retires but, whenever it was suggested to him that the wait was dragging on, he would smile and reply that he had plenty of time. Nobody ever imagined that wasn’t true.