Phillip Hughes Death: Cricket has never been seen as a dangerous sport, not in the same league as motor sports or boxing. Stories about Bodyline or the fearsome West Indies quartet charging, an advancement wearing floppy hats were just that – stories from another era. Helmets, armed guards, chest guards, thigh pads; batsmen were protected. Now, or so he thought.
There was just no kind of grammar for it. There was just no way to put it into words. It’s certainly been by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write about. It was hard then, and it’s hard now.
On November 27, 2014, at 2:23 p.m., cricket changed forever. Phillip Hughes is batting for South Australia against New South Wales in a Sheffield Shield game. He goes for a hook shot, he misses, he collapses in a heap. I remember on my laptop, checking the cricket news, or Phillip Hughes has been hit, and I remember going to the footage of it, and I’ve never seen it again. I just saw it.
Australia, I thought, oh god, that’s terrible. That’s a really bad blow. You don’t often see them fall like that. Hughes is immediately rushed to the hospital for surgery but passes away two days later. Cricket has never witnessed anything like this before. Cricket doesn’t know how to cope. Up until that day, I think every cricketer who walked on the field thought, well, I could get hurt, but I won’t get killed. And then after that Phillip Hughes incident, we all realized differently – that you can get killed.
He’s been earmarked for greatness from a young age. At 19, he became the youngest batsman to score a century in the Sheffield Shield final. At 20, he became the youngest cricketer in history to score a century in each innings of a Test against South Africa in Durban, no less. He was also the youngest Australian Test Centurion since Doug Walters in 1965. Four years after his Test debut, he became the first Australian to score a century on his one-day debut.
People Also Read: Former Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo arrested in Indiana on gun, drug charges
A poor run of form saw him lose his place in the side, but he was a frontrunner to replace the injured Michael Clarke for the series against the visiting Indians. He passed away a couple of weeks before the first test of that series, three days short of his 26th birthday.
He was such a well-loved cricketer, and kind of in the pink of form and kind of on the brink of coming back from a difficult period in his career, and there was a sense of kind of optimism about him, a perennial sense of optimism we’ve got accustomed to over the sort of the preceding decades of batsmen getting hit and sort of just going over, just in himself, often getting up and batting on, which sort of regarded head impacts as just an occupational hazard of batting.
Cricketers, these are a very challenging and contrasting game. It’s good, and it’s bad. It’s kind at its harsh, it’s rough at its smooth, and the rough bits are very rough. And Phil got on the end of a rough bit.
Hughes was well-loved, and the tributes flowed in across the globe. People put their bats out to honor the memory of the batsman. He’d be tall blue sky, Philip Hughes, and all of a sudden, we were deprived of the prospect of seeing him fulfill his potential.
The Australia-India Series went ahead with a tribute scheduled.Sean Abbott, the bowler who delivered the unfortunate bouncer, returned to cricket 17 days later and played in the Indian Premier League for the Royal Challengers Bangalore the next season.
The show, as they say, went on. Though it’s hard to tell if the game you’ve done. I still don’t think cricket’s quite got over it, really. I think there’s just a sense that cricketers feel the need to be stoic about it, to rise above it. There’s a sense sometimes that they’re a little bit more macho than they actually feel.
Four years later, it’s still hard to put the incident into perspective. It’s no fault of cricket, you might say. The protective equipment used to be better thought through. You certainly can’t blame the bowler. It’s a bit of a freak. He probably threw the shot too early. It’s fatal. Don’t know what to say. I mean, the sadness will live forever.
Cricket’s what we do, cricket’s what we love. We, all of us, have a love affair with cricket. Another affair can be inordinately painful at times, and this was perhaps the most painful moment of all. Certainly not something that I would ever care to live through again.
People Also Read: Mitchell Marsh: A Journey of Dedication, Talent, and Resilience
