The Ex-Services Club C-grade end-of-season report reckoned ‘you must live in Alaska if you don’t know about Phillip Hughes’. Against the mixed competition of adults and older boys, he won Player of the Year, as had Jason two years earlier.
IN THE SUMMER PHILLIP turned 11, he played in his own age group for the first time. He made it straight into the inter-district representative side for the Sunday competition, and his quiet cricket intelligence saw him chosen as captain despite, or perhaps because of, the fact he batted, bowled and kept wickets.
On 13 November 1999, he travelled north to Coffs Harbour for a rep match against Lower Clarence. It was an early start to get there before 10 am for the toss, which Nambucca Bellingen won. Phillip chose to bat. And bat he did.
Junior sides commonly made 100, maybe 150. The ball was hard, the grass was never short, the boundaries were long and scoring rates were low. When Phillip batted, however, his sides reached the 200 mark more often than not. His coaches, teammates, opponents and family say he had a feel for what was necessary. If wickets were falling, he would hang on and never get flustered; if the time was right, he would accelerate. Think Michael Bevan, who was steering teams to winning totals in one-day internationals, or Michael Hussey in years to come. This pre-teen boy was batting the same way.
Many of the later stories would come from his big scores made quickly, but Josh Lawrence marvelled at his patience.
‘Phillip always valued his wicket. He could face out four or five maidens, just block, block, block. He’d say, “Mate, I am going to make these blokes bowl at me”. He just had the mental capacity to go on.’
As a young cricketer, it was his ability to occupy the crease that stood out. His teammates could get frustrated at him digging in and not scoring, but he believed it was his job to be the backbone of an innings. The president of the North Coast Cricket Council, Ian Dinham, had a son, Braden, who played in representative sides with Phillip. Ian tells of a Combined High Schools trial game where Phillip hit a decent score, but faced 44 dot balls before getting off the mark.
‘You just couldn’t get him out,’ he says. ‘Phillip knew what he had to do to get his team a good total.’
In the 1999 game at Coffs, he watched four of his Nambucca Bellingen top order partners disappear. Most openers would be getting nervous by now. Tom Schmidt came to the crease and put on 69 with Phillip before getting out for 14. The little captain was scoring the bulk of the runs. The tail, like the top order, couldn’t handle the Lower Clarence bowlers, and only Mitch Lonergan (17) showed any resolve.
Still, it was overs, not partners, that Phillip ran out of. He got into the 90s, but his chance of a century was ruined when two wickets fell in the 49th over. He ended up 95 not out. The fact that he’d only hit four boundaries shows how hard he had to work.
The following day, he opened the batting against Armidale and scored 77. As captain, he gave himself a bowl at first change and a return of three for 11 from four overs stopped anybody suggesting it shouldn’t be so. In another match against Armidale, he scored 44 retired and then dismissed the top three batsmen on the way to figures of four for 10. Those who saw him bowl later are unanimous in poking fun at his run-up, action and speed, but in junior cricket he was canny, accurate and effective.
Tournaments and carnivals meant Phillip, Greg and Jason spent a lot of time out of town on the weekends, but Phillip managed to play in round one for the Macksville Under-14s, scoring 51 not out, and taking two for three. The annual report says that Phillip and Harley Schmidt (29) got ‘Macksville off to a good start, although scoring at a slow rate’. Macksville beat Urunga by nine wickets, so it is hard to understand why the openers needed to be in any sort of a hurry.
The Hughes brothers were back in town for the semifinal against Nambucca and the grand final against Urunga, winning both. Phillip had been notching half-centuries all summer, including the 95 not out, and it seemed a matter of time before circumstances allowed him to climb the mountain to three figures.
Phillip’s maiden century, 103 for Nambucca Bellingen. Having outscored the opposition on his own, he walked off to a standing ovation.
In February, the Nambucca Bellingen rep side played their grand final against Grafton. Over the years, Greg would notice that his second son lifted for the big occasions. When the team needed runs in a final, it was usually Phillip who got them. Greg and Virginia were there to watch, another reliable indicator that this would be a big day.
He won the toss and, in humid conditions, batted. He watched partner after partner fall to the strong Grafton bowlers. His good mate Nathan Smith and Trent Matthews hung around for a while, but the six Nambucca Bellingen batsmen who were dismissed in the 45 overs he was in tallied 58 runs between them. It didn’t bother Phillip; they were there long enough to enable him to score 103 runs. He had his maiden hundred. He took two wickets as Grafton fell for 101; he had outscored the opposition team all on his own.
Over the years, Phillip developed the habit of souveniring the game ball each time he made a century and noting the score and date along the seam. In his bedroom cupboard are two wicker baskets filled with balls. Sometimes he would get them out and line them up; he loved runs and he loved big runs. Greg lost count toward the end, but he thinks Phillip scored 68 or 70 centuries before he left Macksville as a 17-year-old.
Innings like his first century were not easily forgotten. Four years later, one of the officials from Urunga, Garry Matthews, wrote to Phillip to thank him for his contribution to inter-district cricket: ‘As you are aware I am something of a fan of yours, your amazing talent and dedication on the field has impressed me over the years . . . I have a wonderful memory of your century in the Under-12s Inter District Final all those years ago indented in my head and I often reflect on that day with a wry smile. Usually those around me ask me what I am smiling about and I say, “I am just reflecting on a great memory”.’
A week after making his first century, he again made it through all the school zone selection trials to play for Polding in the Catholic primary schools state competition. Selectors at trials never relied on his reputation, as he delivered on the day. Having had a taste, he became instantly addicted to scoring hundreds, and the following summer he would score five: two for Polding at the carnival, one for his state, one for the Macksville Colts and one for the Macksville Under-14s. If you were involved in junior cricket in New South Wales, you knew of Phillip Hughes.
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POLDING HAD NEVER WON a Primary Schools Sports Association (PSSA) championship in any sport. The teams from the major centres took the PSSA very seriously, but Polding team manager Ken McNamara was more interested in the boys getting a chance to enjoy the competition. ‘The carnival was all about boys enjoying playing cricket at a higher level . . . Winning was not a priority,’ he says. To prove his commitment to participation, he ensured that all ten of his players (excluding the wicketkeeper) got a bowl in every match, whether they were good enough or not.
Phillip, however, had higher goals. Having scored well in the previous carnival, he quietly set his sights on the state primary schools’ side. He wanted a NSW cap and he had three innings to earn it, unless the team defied history and made the final.
The diverse group of boys got together at ELS Hall Park at North Ryde in Sydney. When the rain stopped, they did training drills, which didn’t reveal much. Almost every boy claimed to be an opening batsman, but Phillip got the job for the first match against Sydney East the following day.
Those who missed out on opening the innings breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the intimidating Shariful Islam mark out his run and deliver the first ball. The Bangladeshi-born all-rounder was the fastest bowler in the tournament. He and Phillip would meet many times in years to come, but this was the first time they had laid eyes on each other. It was a coming together of kindred spirits: talented, determined and quiet. Both had a job to do and on this day it involved beating the other.
Greg remembers, ‘The first day was that wet, they bowled from [only] one end. We came up against this real fast guy, Shariful, with a long run-up. The kid was so quick the [Polding] number three batsman said to the coach he would bat at ten. The kids weren’t really into it.’
A proud Virginia with St Patrick’s newly appointed Sports Captain.
Shariful knocked over Phillip’s opening partner and the first drop early in the innings on his way to figures of four for 22. The country kids couldn’t handle his pace. Except one.
Phillip ‘hit him everywhere’, according to Greg. He scored runs at will as his new teammates were trundled out for next to nothing. Only three Polding batsmen made double figures, but when the innings was finished Phillip Hughes was still there on 108 not out, of a team total of 218.
Sydney East couldn’t match Phillip’s score and were all out for 97. Ken McNamara was so happy to have won a game that he announced, ‘That’ll do me.’
The manager was satisfied enough to go home with a win. Phillip, however, had other plans.
‘I remember that game very well,’ Shariful says. ‘It was the first time I had seen him but I had heard a bit about him. He was the key wicket, we knew that, but I just couldn’t get him out. He bombed me for six a couple of times. It was “wow”. He was so talented. You could tell straightaway that he was the next big thing. From that day on I knew that this guy was going to be our next Don Bradman.’
After the game, the Hugheses met the Islams. The difference in backgrounds meant nothing. Shariful was born in Bangladesh and raised in Lakemba in Sydney’s west. Both places are a world away from Macksville, but the boys had the game as common ground and a quiet resolve that bonded them in the years ahead.
Shariful remembers his first conversation with the batsman who was barely half his size.
‘You were amazing out there.’
‘You almost got me out a few times.’
‘Yeah, but you were better.’
‘I was trying to find out what he did better than the other batsmen and how he maintained that control,’ Shariful admits now. ‘He had a level of humbleness that he draws from his family. Then we spoke again during the presentations at selection and from there we stayed in touch through phone calls, because we both had the same goals and aspirations.’
Shariful’s family grew to love Phillip.
‘My mum cried when he got selected for Australia. She said, “This boy came to my house and ate my food”. They were so pleased for him.’
Phillip only scored 30 next innings in the match against MacKillop, but it was easily the highest score of the innings. He took a great catch at first slip that had deflected off the keeper, and captured a wicket with his bowling. The country kids had won their second straight match.
The third and last game, against the imposing Sydney West side, would decide if they made the finals. Phillip’s 23 was second-highest score in Polding’s total of 101. While not a great score, good fielding and bowling (including two for 12 from the Macksville boy) got Polding over the line with ten runs to spare.
In the context of the matches and the age group, 30 and 23 were good scores, but Phillip was disappointed to have thrown away good starts, and also anxious about how they might have affected his chances of state selection. There was pressure, but Polding making the final meant he would get one more chance.
The excitement of the northern Catholic outfit making it this far was obvious in the celebrations among kids, parents and coaches. The managers from other teams who were more experienced at this level couldn’t help but be impressed with Phillip. Some suggested that Ken drop the idea of giving all ten kids a bowl for the final match against the Combined Independent Schools XI, but the Polding manager figured it had got them this far, so why not do it in the final?
The city sides would never do that, but they didn’t have Phillip Hughes in their team. That the other managers offered advice suggests how everybody was hoping the boys from the bush might take down their private-school opponents, although they were a little taken aback when Ken told them, ‘Thanks, but we will do it our way’.
Father and son were inseparable from the start. Phillip’s wearing his favourite Bowraville Tigers T-shirt.
The final was held at Waitara (later Mark Taylor) Oval in Sydney’s leafy northern suburbs. The Hugheses got there well ahead of everyone else because, as Greg explains, ‘Me not knowing the city and Phil not being the best navigator, we usually arrived early, just in case we got lost. Phillip would get lost riding his bike around town.’
They stayed with Greg’s brother Ian, who lived in Sydney and came to the ground that morning. They were early enough to see the curator putting the finishing touches to the pitch. Phillip had played only a handful of games on turf wickets. It would be a few years yet before Macksville laid its own.
‘What do you reckon, bat or bowl?’ Greg asked.
‘I’m not allowed to tell you,’ the curator said.
Fair enough, they thought. Then the man gave them a bit of a grin and said, ‘But I would love to bat on this myself.’
Father and son were struck by the beauty of a first-grade Sydney ground.
Greg says, ‘White picket fence, mown grass, lots of turf wickets, Mark Taylor’s name on the electronic scoreboard – we had never seen anything like it in our lives.’
Nor had city or country parents seen anything like what Phillip produced that day.
He won the toss and chose to bat. A flying start took the score to 110 before Nicholas Burrows was out for 27. The boy from the bush was already 64 and batting as if possessed.
Greg says, ‘He absolutely smashed them, he was cutting the ball from the farthest pitch and they would be on their fourth run when the ball would hit the fence.’
The speed of this outfield was like nothing they had seen in the valley.
While Ken McNamara had been getting advice, so had opposition coach Steve Tomlinson, the director of boys’ sports at the exclusive Barker College in Waitara. The night before the match, other managers had told him to be wary of Phillip Hughes.
After Nicholas was gone, Blake Creighton contributed 18 to a partnership of 93. When he was gone, Phillip just kept going. It was, Ken said later, ‘an innings that was talked about all afternoon’.
Tomlinson says, ‘We missed stumping him on 50 and thought, “How much is this going to cost?” . . . Phillip tore us to bits.’
In junior cricket, 60 or 70 was a great score. To reach a hundred was something else, but Phillip was not satisfied. Why stop when you are having fun? When the last ball of the 50 overs was bowled, he was 159 not out, in Polding’s 214.
‘The best I ever saw,’ Tomlinson says.
Throughout, Greg was circling the ground. ‘At first I think it was nerves and then as he started to build an innings I reckon it was excitement,’ he says.
The hat-stand at East Street still bears the load of Phillip’s many representative caps.
As Phillip pushed on, Greg stopped near a fig tree where the well-dressed parents of the private school kids had made their camp. He overheard one of them say, ‘This is just not junior cricket.’
Which was a fair summation of what Phillip had done.
Ian Hughes knew his nephew was good, but that day he witnessed something extraordinary. He took a picture of the scoreboard.
‘I didn’t know a lot about junior sport, but I knew this was special. He was special.’
Abandoned by his restless brother, Ian got talking to an older man who was sitting watching the game.
‘That was your nephew?’ the stranger asked. ‘That was the best batting I have ever seen by a young player.’
The highest ODI score by an Australian batsman was Adam Gilchrist’s 154 against Sri Lanka at the MCG a year earlier. The highest ever percentage of a team’s total in an ODI was Sir Viv Richards’s 189 not out in a total of 272, or 69 per cent. Phillip had scored 74 per cent of his side’s total, but that wasn’t unusual, as he had been batting through innings with less competent batsmen in underage cricket. It was what he did.
‘The biggest problem with junior cricket is batsmen never stay there,’ Greg explains. ‘Phillip knew there were no runs in the grandstand. Other kids who might be good bats would block three or four balls and then hit it in the air or get frustrated.’
Greg had watched a lot of junior cricket and believed that at this age a kid could only hit the ball 25 to 30 metres in the air, ‘which was straight to the fieldsman’. Phillip knew to keep the ball on the ground, but had patience well beyond his years and a hunger for runs that knew no bounds.
‘He always wanted more,’ Greg says. ‘And if he missed out, he wouldn’t worry. “I’ll get them tomorrow,” he would say. Invariably, he did.’
Phillip’s selection in the NSW team, announced after the final, was a formality. The Sydney South West coach and manager of the NSW PSSA team, Jason Ellsmore, remembered Phillip from his efforts the year before and during the day received a phone call telling him what was going on. Nobody could quite believe how big the Grade Six student had gone. Ellsmore says the selectors had already decided Phillip had done enough with his earlier hundred in the tournament, but they were more than pleased to see him go even bigger.
The shell-shocked private-school kids rallied to make 187. They might have got fewer if Ken McNamara hadn’t stuck to his guns and given ten boys a bowl. Polding won the championship, its first in any sport. Phillip had scored 320 runs at an average of 160. His name was read out in the state team, but there was better news to come – he’d been appointed captain. He’d set himself his goal and surpassed it. It was one proud boy who was presented with his first-ever NSW cap by former Test spinner Bob Holland that afternoon. Greg and Uncle Ian were pretty proud, too.
Phillip was the first boy from Polding to be selected in the state side. Macksville was as pleased as the family, and his achievements were reported in papers. Everybody was claiming a piece of him. The Macksville Ex-Services Club devoted a full page to his achievements in its annual report, extraordinary for one so young.
He already had a bat sponsor. Earlier that summer, Andrew Maggs, a cricketer from down the river at Nambucca Heads, had brought his C-grade side down to play in Scotts Head, an isolated seaside hamlet off the highway south of Macksville. A long drive along the Scotts Head Road delivers you to the postage-stamp ground between the caravan park and the bowling green, right by the sea.
After leading them to the state championship, Phillip made history as the first Polding boy to be selected for NSW.
‘I was fortunate enough to have a few talented kids in my side and they were older than Greg’s kids,’ Andrew recalls. ‘But you could see straightaway that Jason and Phillip were outstanding young cricketers.’
Andrew and his wife had bought a franchise for Callen Cricket, an equipment range owned by former Test player Ian Callen. Andrew had been told that if he saw somebody with genuine potential, he ought to do something for them. After the game at Scotts Head, he said to Greg Hughes, ‘Mate, I have never seen a kid bat like that, he is really something special. I think he will play for Australia one day.’
‘It was the way he did it,’ Andrew says. ‘They had lost a lot of their top batsmen. This little kid came out and we had good bowlers on. All of a sudden he plays this late cut for four. I was like, “Great shot!” I was in slip, clapping every shot he played: a couple of cover drives, the cut shots . . . he just had it. I had seen a lot of kids play cricket up and down the coast, I had seen a lot of good cricketers, but I had never seen anyone like Phillip.’
Maggsy had a special Callen bat at home and said he would do the Hugheses a deal. If they bought the matching equipment, he would give them the bat.
The company gained plenty of local exposure, as Phillip was rarely photographed without that bat in the next few years.
Phillip was always grateful for the support he received. A few years later when a cricket-loving boss gave Nino Ramunno time off to pick up his cousin at Sydney airport and the flexibility to drop him at tournaments, Phillip, without any prompting, autographed a bat and gave it to Nino’s boss in gratitude.
One of the people Phillip sought out after the PSSA final at Waitara Oval was Andrew Maggs, exclaiming, ‘Maggsy! It was the bat! Every time I hit something in the middle it went to the fence.’
Maggs tried to let him know it wasn’t just the bat.
Two months later, Phillip got to wear his blue NSW cap when he led the team onto the field for the first match of the School Sports Australian Primary Cricket Exchange in Cobram Barooga, near the NSW–Victorian border. Greg, Phillip, Jason and Uncle Ian made the trip and set themselves up in the local motel. It was more than a 1000-kilometre drive from East Street, but Phillip made sure his family had not made the trip in vain.
It was dry and hot and the flies were terrible, but the cricket was good. NSW played a combined side in the first match at Strathmerton Cricket Ground, a dot on the Murray Valley Highway. Phillip opened the batting.
Under competition rules, coaches and managers couldn’t talk to the kids between the first ball and the drinks break. The opposition captain decided for the first session that he didn’t need a third man. Big mistake – Phillip was like a kid in a lolly shop.
‘It was not real smart. He just kept cutting them to the boundary,’ Jason Ellsmore remembers. ‘By the break he was about 60 runs and 40 had gone through that area of the ground. He smashed them, and when I say smashed them, he absolutely blazed away.’
A third man was eventually put in, but when he went wide Phillip hit the ball fine of him, and when he moved finer, Phillip hit it wider. He was toying with them.
Phillip was retired on 115 so the other kids could have a hit. The combined side was all out for 95. He’d beaten a team single-handedly. Again.
It was the first time the other states had seen Phillip Hughes in full flight, but they wouldn’t forget him. Phillip left the tournament with the highest aggregate and the highest average (55).
Ellsmore discovered something that teammates would comment on for years to come. ‘When he got out, he didn’t throw his bat or carry on. He was disappointed, but it was that disappointment when you are having fun and the fun stops. He was a quiet boy with a big grin and wide eyes and he had a reasonable sense of humour too. He had an absolute love of the game.’
The tournaments allowed like-minded kids to catch up, and there were gatherings around the motel pool. One night, at a barbecue by the Murray, the boys swam as the men turned the snags and drank a few beers.
Ian remembers that from the moment they had arrived there was a buzz around his nephew. ‘Everyone seemed to know Phillip or had heard of him.’
When he batted, people stopped to watch the kid who made their sons look pedestrian.
You didn’t forget Phillip Hughes. Some years later, Ian ran into a man who remembered his son coming home from a game of cricket and telling him he’d just played against the best cricketer he had ever seen, a little kid from Macksville.
The NSW PSSA team manager Damian Toohey had been watching Phillip for a few seasons. ‘We used to talk about playing “in the V” until you are comfortable but the cut shot was something he sweated on with the new ball. He could hit any ball outside off-stump for four through point or behind gully . . . People talk about him being unorthodox, but he put himself in a position to hit balls more often than not. He could wipe a team quickly without going out there to belt them. He did it by putting away the bad balls.’
On turf wickets, it was Phillip’s cricketing brain, as much as his hunger for runs, that left a mark on Toohey. ‘The beauty of carnival cricket is that the wickets vary considerably. You could go to a four-day carnival and play on four different wickets. Phillip could adjust to any wicket and took his time to get used to the wicket before playing shots. When he got to Barooga and the wicket was flat, it was playing into his hands and he could bat for four days. At carnivals he could bat for as long as the team needed him to bat. He always had a good understanding of the game situation.’
On day three of the carnival, NSW had to play at Strathmerton again and Jason Ellsmore noticed something strange. ‘All these farmers had rolled in and were waiting for the toss. They had heard about Phillip and downed tools on the farm for the day to come in and watch this 12-year-old bat. We lost the toss and bowled, so they went home, but they came back at lunch in their utes wearing shorts and boots and stuff. Phillip to some degree failed. He got 20-odd runs, and with that they all left. I am sitting there thinking, “This is like the stories my old man used to tell me about Bradman”.’
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IT MAY SEEM PHILLIP Hughes had a single obsession, but elite junior cricketers were yet to be monopolised through the winter. As a rugby league player, Phillip was elusive and fearless, though he displayed a physical aggression that was at odds with his calm at the batting crease.
His dad, his uncles and Jason were all good players and Phillip had, according to some judges, great ability at league. He represented Polding while at primary school, played representative football at high school and was a star player for the Bowraville Tigers, the same club that produced rugby league great Greg Inglis, who lived 200 metres from the Hugheses in Wall Street.
Nathan Smith, who would be good enough to play in the NRL, says, ‘As much as everyone will say he was dedicated to cricket, which he was, he was just as dedicated to anything he was doing at the time. When we were playing footy in the backyard, he was 100 per cent dedicated to it.’
The Donnelly Welsh Fields became a mudheap behind East Street and the neighbourhood kids thought it perfect for football. Mitch Lonergan remembers playing in knee-deep water and coming home in clothes stinking like a swamp to a disgusted mum. Mitch and his father Morrie remember one game Phillip played for Bowraville in particular.
‘In the Under-13s or 14s we beat a side by about 100-plus to nil and Phil scored 66 points himself,’ Mitch says. ‘He was freakish. I was pretty sure it was against Orara Valley at Bowraville. He scored five or six tries and kicked every goal.’
Morrie, another parent who adored Phillip, coached him at the Tigers and was as impressed by his football skills as by his manner. He first had Phillip with Greg Inglis in the Under-7s, and watched him and Mitch play for years. One year Phillip won best and fairest despite missing half the season with injury.
‘He played five-eighth, halfback, second row – he would play anywhere. To be honest, he tore this side apart with his ferocity,’ Morrie remembers. ‘He was only a little fellow but he was that hard . . . he was a very tough boy. Nothing worried him. He was fearless even though he was half their size.’
Teammate Joel Dallas says, ‘Whenever he played sport another side of him came out. You used to see this aggression – he just loved the competition. He was a fast runner, he was tough, he was a little ball of muscle, he just went for it pretty much. There was no holding back. I reckon he could have played professional league if he wanted to.’
Phillip was keen to go as far as he could, but was often playing cricket when the winter sport season started and finished, and he would miss the football trials. But he couldn’t let go of the code. When he was in his late teens and on the verge of touring India with the Australian Under-19 side, he showed up to football training and announced he wanted to play a season with his mates in the Macksville Under-18s.
‘He played and did his ankle and we all looked at each other and knew that was the end of that,’ Morrie recalls. Phillip had broken his ankle and that was indeed the end of his football career, but he always harboured the desire to go back and have another crack. When, after establishing himself as a cricketer, Phillip made plans to retire to Greg’s farm with his own cattle, he had clear plans for weekends, according to Mitch Lonergan.
‘He always said, “You’ll be living back at home when you’re 36, I’ll be living on the farm, and, us and Jason, we’ll play reserve-grade footy for Macksville”. That’s all he wanted to do.’
Morrie Lonergan believes Phillip was good enough but wonders if his height would have held him back. ‘Being a rugby league man through and through, I would tell you he had the capacity, the skill, the toughness and the determination, but knowing the way these NRL people pick sides, I don’t think he would have made it. Not because he wasn’t good enough, but back then they were looking for six-foot-two halfbacks.’
