On June 25, 2013, the Australian cricket team had its first training session under its new coach Darren Lehmann in Taunton, Somerset. Mickey Arthur had been sacked, Michael Clarke had stood down as a selector, and an Ashes series was two weeks away. Turmoil? Disarray? Nobody had told Phillip Hughes.
That night, a trivia quiz was hosted by team doctor Peter Brukner, but it was Hughes who made the team laugh and forget their troubles. Hughes, paired with Clarke, was ribbed by teammates for being a bit of a hayseed: they said he knew a lot about cricket and cattle but not much else. His spelling, even for a sportsman, was atrocious. Hughes replied that he might not be very academic but he was "street smart". This only got more laughs. Whatever. Hughes slayed them, and was trivia king for a day, having yet again taken gleeful revenge on those who underestimated him.
Phillip Joel Hughes knew more than cricket and cattle. He was smart enough to be welcomed, and loved, in any changing room he entered around the world. He was smart enough to have a good life in cricket.
Raised in Macksville and finished in Sydney grade cricket at Western Suburbs, where he, like Clarke and fellow future Test player Mitchell Starc, were coached by Neil D'Costa, Hughes's precocious talent would lead him to the modern cricket star's cosmopolitan life. He turned out not only for NSW and Australia but also the English counties Hampshire, Middlesex and Worcestershire, the Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League, and for the Strikers and South Australia when he moved to Adelaide in 2012. He represented his country in all three formats and made new friends in each. Wherever he played, he was popular for his simple, light heart; there was no side to Phillip Hughes. As he maintained, he was smarter than he looked; street smart.
Yet if he brought an uncomplicated love of cricket to the changing room, his career followed a twisting path. Watching the 20-year-old score a Sheffield Shield century in Newcastle in January 2009, the late Peter Roebuck wrote: "Nothing upset him, not catching a bus from Canberra the previous evening and arriving in the dead of night, not the watching eyes of a national selector… Unfazed, he just kept batting and batting and made it seem as natural as breathing." But Hughes' unusual technique – his bandy-legged stance, his off-side bias, apparently shaped by in impenetrable on-side (the wall of the family home) in his parents' backyard, his relish for slashing at balls as they went past him rather than plunging forward to meet them – soon wrought confusion. Bowlers didn't know where to bowl to him, but before long selectors didn't know what to do with him.
Taken to South Africa with Ricky Ponting's 2009 team, after just 17 first-class matches, Hughes was out for a duck on his Test cricket debut in Johannesburg. Roebuck commented on his "unusual hotch-potch of eye and instinct". The South African bowlers thought his technique "had more holes than a colander". But Hughes had the next laugh, making twin centuries in his second Test match at Durban, the first player in Test history to begin his career with a duck, a fifty, a century and a 150. Roebuck saluted his courage: "The sight of the little lad from Macksville going eye to belly with [196cm-tall Morne] Morkel counts among the most amusing the game has known. Suffice it to say the youngster did not take a backward step. Red-blooded confrontations of this sort are good for the game. Test cricket is not a tea party."
But Hughes's twin Durban centuries, helping Australia to a surprise series victory, were not the end of his apprenticeship but only the beginning. He shrugged off being called "the new Bradman" after his South African series, too modest and too smart to believe the hype. And two months later he was dropped by selectors who sensed that the rigours of being probed by English bowlers would damage his mentality.
Instead, being dropped did the greater damage. Had Hughes been a more defiant, bloody-minded character, he might have told the newly mushrooming world of batting advisers to get lost. Instead, a good student and a polite person, not wanting to offend, he listened to many voices, and duly lost confidence in his idiosyncrasies.
What never deserted him for long was the ability to pile up runs in domestic cricket. His consistency earned him periodic Test call-ups through 2010 and 2011. He appeared to have finally cemented his place with a five-hour century against Sri Lanka in Pallekele in September 2011, settling the question of his ability to play spin. Yet nothing ever seemed settled for long; Hughes would be one of the most talked-about cricketers of his generation because nobody, it seemed, could work out how a batsman with such a quirky technique keep churning out so many runs. National selectors wanted him to succeed, but were not patient with his inevitable dry spells. At home in late 2011, he struggled against New Zealand's full-pitched swing bowling, and was dropped again. No cricketer was more persistent; none was so faithful to the selectors' order to go back to first-class cricket and make your case irresistible. Hughes did just that, and got another call-up in late 2012. He was one of the few batsmen to show improvement during Australia's disastrous tour of India in 2013 and then, in his penultimate Test match, was Ashton Agar's partner as they set a world record for the last wicket in Nottingham. When asked if he saw Agar's famous 98 on debut, Hughes replied, "Yeah, I was at the other end." He scored 81 not out, surely an innings that stamped his coming of age at that level. But one Test match later, he was dropped again.
Hughes was unstintingly loyal to Clarke, who reportedly pushed for his Test recall last month in the Middle East. On Tuesday, with Clarke set to be ruled unavailable to play in next week's first Test match against India, Hughes was batting his way back into the Australian team.
The reactions of Australian and international cricketers to Hughes's hospitalisation have spoken eloquently for the man's popularity. Even for members of the cricket community who did not know him personally, there is something about the game, the long examination under which it places individuals, that gives us the sense that we know the players. Phillip Hughes was an unforgettable cricketer, a personality cricketer: a little battler who was also thrilling to watch, a low-key country boy who expressed himself on the field with a uniquely flamboyant style. His countrymen always wanted him to succeed, sometimes desperately so, as if he were a puzzle that surely had a solution. There was no way a man with so much talent, and such a sweet temperament, could fall short of his potential. He would turn 26 this Sunday. We thought he had so many more years to find his way.
