by DOC » Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:42 pm
A very fine article by Gideon Haigh in this mornings Australian.
The enduring legacy of Phillip Hughes GIDEON HAIGH
My younger brother recently turned 50. At least he would have done had he not died in an accident at the age of 17.
Such an event splits the individual in your mind. You are left with memory of who they were, so vivid, and also a sense of the space where they should be, with all that they were precluded from achieving — less palpable, but in some senses just as influential, as you move on without the communion and consolation of their company.
This has also become integral to my understanding of Phillip Hughes, who died five years ago today, aged 25, and who this Sunday would have turned 31. A cricketer of seemingly limitless potential, he would now, had he lived, be in his batting prime.
So we are left with the Hughes fixed in time, as indelible as the inked likeness on Matthew Wade’s right forearm, and the cricketer and the man he might have become, the ‘promise’ he was prevented from fulfilling.
Sport intensifies such sensations. It compresses and accelerates time, makes everything seem so close and so graspable.
In a single game, a cricketer can take huge strides, as Hughes did in March 2009 when in his second Test he made twin hundreds at Kingsmead against South Africa — he remains the youngest to achieve the feat.
Hughes peeled these runs off with such confounding ease and contagious glee it was as though he did not know to be intimidated.
Temperament and technique are usually distinguished, or are seen as developing at different rates: a cricketer strong in one may not be strong in the other.
It was Hughes’s particular faculty that temperament and technique formed part of the same continuum. His cricket seemed an extension of his personality: game, spontaneous, sunny, eager.
In a time of great change, he also pleasingly married old and new. From Macksville, a banana farmer’s son, he was the country cricketer in excelsis who became the project cricketer in progress.
These roles had not been entirely reconciled at his death. There had been criticisms of Hughes’s method, so homespun, so unique, built around not canonical correct drives but a rasping square cut.
It’s one of the many things impossible to say, but you suspect that this was a phase, that eventually success would have disarmed the doubters.
After all, in 2014, there remained those who still could not work out how Steve Smith, six months Hughes’s junior, succeeded by his heterodox fashion.
Hughes had a similar avidity for batting, and for runs. In 88 first-class matches ex Test cricket, he had made 23 centuries and averaged 51. He was the same age on his death as Marnus Labuschagne now, and even had the same coach in the ubiquitous Neil D’Costa.
This brings us to the other great significance of Hughes’s death, that it evoked both the tightness of the elite cricket community and the breadth of the game’s appeal.
There is a superb memento of Hughes’s career, the official biography written by my colleagues Peter Lalor and Malcolm Knox at the behest of the cricketer’s bereaved family.
Through extensive first-hand testimony, it evokes Hughes’s close kinship with his cricket generation — their awe at his talent, their delight in his warmth, their universal satisfaction at his success.
So much cricket had Hughes played already that everyone knew him, and he knew them. Justin Langer, then in his role as Australian batting coach, spoke of trying to “break him to see what he had” by his training regime but being unable to; also that he and his wife “wanted him as either a son or a son-in-law”.
A host of interviewees testified to Hughes’s knack of relaxing match situations and changing rooms, his cheek and his humour, the genuine goodwill he radiated to seeming rivals, the esteem in which he was held by opponents.
In the aftermath of Hughes’s death, Virat Kohli’s Indians were grace personified, and New Zealand and Pakistan first delayed a Test then continued it in his sportsmen’s spirit.
Cricket in Australia is seldom entirely content. It has strong personalities, competing influences, abiding discontents. On only two occasions can I recall it feeling as though the public were completely unified in expressing their love for and protectiveness of the game: in the overwhelming mourning of Hughes’s death, and in the unmitigated disgust after Sandpapergate.
A further imponderable: would there have been a Sandpapergate had Hughes been in that tense, embattled, exhausted and alienated dressing room at Newlands? From that team something had clearly gone missing. Hughes might well have provided it.
Certainly, scratch the surface of the game in this country and the space Hughes left remains, notwithstanding the constructive initiatives to assuage the trauma and often quite heroic efforts to make good his loss.
Most obviously, everyone understands the stakes of cricket’s inherent danger. When Smith was felled by Jofra Archer at Lord’s in July, the alarm was electric and the fear tangible.
There was hearty approval of the insouciance with which England’s fielders treated Ricky Ponting when his eye was gashed by a Steve Harmison bouncer at Lord’s in 2005.
This time, Archer was excoriated for showing insufficient solicitousness of Smith’s condition. It was, definitively, a post-Hughes behavioural critique.
But I think it is more. Cricket is increasingly geared to manufacturing lookalikes; there seems less scope for the self-taught, the self-directed. The game still possesses fine players, suitable for admiration; it rather wants for winning personalities, easy to like.
Andrew Ramsey’s fine account of the aftermath of Hughes’s death for Wisden was entitled ‘Everyone’s Little Brother’, taking its cue from Hughes’s cheery habit of calling everyone ‘bru’, and also the conclusion to Michael Clarke’s uplifting eulogy: “So rest in peace, my little brother, I’ll see you out in the middle.”
On November 27, 2014, cricket lost its little brother. And coping with such a loss is a lifetime’s work.