That day, that week, that helpless, hopeless fortnight comes at you 10 years later in a blur of images – the bowler cradling Phillip Hughes’s head, the teammate removing his pads, the orderly assembly of cricket bats on front porches, the detached explanation of the neurosurgeon, the mourners fanning themselves in the high school gymnasium.
It was a basal subarachnoid haemorrhage – a sick fluke. We’re largely inured to such tragedies now but occasionally they get in your marrow. A child is struck by a car crashing into a playground. A family is blown to bits by a missile. A young girl is murdered and dumped in a tip. A cricketer is killed at the crease.
The people who sneer at sport – and sometimes it deserves to be sneered at – say our response to these tragedies is excessive, provincial, almost embarrassing. But even if we’ve never met them, sportspeople can still move us, repel us, shock us, teach us. And when they die too young, we can mourn them.
Hughes’s death certainly stirred the public in ways we’d never before seen. There was a restraint, a dignity, a decency that was at odds with the social media that instigated it. It was a reminder that sport is ultimately a shared experience, and that not all such actions are conjured up by sponsors, administrators or broadcasters.
And it was a reminder of something else – something that cricket, with its quirks and its village traditions and its rough democracy – does better than most sports. It’s the understanding that everyone, from the most inept suburban trundler to the solar fame and talent of Virat Kohli, is playing the same game, respecting the same history, subject to the same laws and facing the same dangers. Cricketers, whether at Christmas lunch or at Lord’s, take guard and assess their options. Cricketers raise their bat, curse their luck and shadow stroke the shot they should have played. And cricketers always go home.
The fondness of memory and the depth of loss no doubt speaks to the kind of cricketer Hughes was. For so long in Australia, cricket was about paying your dues, waiting in line and seizing your chance. Hughes’s career was almost the inverse of that. He burst into Test cricket in a blaze of light. We’d grown up watching stubby openers scratch around. But Hughes was unlike any of them. He was so loose, so unorthodox, so utterly undaunted by the crack South African bowling line-up. Wearing a black armband to honour Victoria’s bushfire victims, he brought up his maiden ton with consecutive sixes.
We all have our memories of him, but I vividly recall the first ball he faced against Pakistan in the Sydney Test a year later. Mohammad Sami shuffled in and Hughes tried to hit him into Kippax Lake. He faced 10 balls and didn’t make a run, but I loved him all the more for it.
Anyone who has lost a loved one far too young is tortured by the same thoughts. What would they be like now? What would they look like? What sort of adult would they have grown to be? They hit you in moments of joy and in the mundanity of everyday life. You welcome a newborn but there is an absence, an aching loss. You see a woman on the train who would be the same age, the same hair colour. You do the arithmetic, and stare a little longer than you should.
With sportspeople, particularly on days like today, those questions nag away too. How would Hughes have adapted and improved his game? Would he have been a calming, sensible voice in the sandpaper Test? How would he have handled Jasprit Bumrah on the weekend? In his eulogy, Michael Clarke said he kept looking for him, kept expecting him to pop up, to saunter in, to lighten the mood. Occasionally, though increasingly rarely, I see a cricketer who reminds me of Hughes. They’re usually young, invariably from the country, usually before the rough edges have been knocked off their game. Sometimes, I listen to an AFL draftee from the country and I hear Hughes’s voice – that dry, bony, completely unaffected accent we heard at his funeral.
At the funeral there was a single bat, a Kookaburra, leaning against a coffin. The pews were filled with prime ministers, Indian superstars and local cattle farmers. For loved ones and for those who didn’t know him, the communion, the eulogies, the tributes, the conga lines of bats around the world – it was all a comfort.
Time heals, they tell you. And they are right to a point. But grief, Joan Didion wrote, “comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life”. Sport helps. Sport is sometimes a way of connecting and deflecting and finding meaning when the real things are too hard to talk about, too hard to countenance. I once saw it referred to as “the great avoidance”. In sports like cricket, there can be solace in numbers, in dates, in averages. But while Hughes’s numbers bring some sort of clarity, they offer no comfort. He was 63 not out. It has been 10 years. He would have been 36 this Saturday.
I once saw an interview with a footballer whose daughter had died of a brain tumour. “Did he feel cheated?” the journalist asked. The footballer, the father, was flattened by that question. Of course, he eventually said. But she was the one who’d been cheated.
Those who loved Phillip Hughes spoke of the things he would now never get to do – regaining his Test spot, realising his talent, becoming a parent, retiring to breed Angus cattle. He was robbed of all that. It was a life celebrated and a life that will never be forgotten. But it was a life robbed nonetheless. I’ll say it again – he would have been 36 this Saturday. Nothing we do as fans and nothing we write as journalists can properly meet the crushing desolation of that.
