‘Some people are put on this earth to play cricket for Australia. Ricky Ponting, Michael Clarke and Steve Smith are, and Phil Hughes was another of those.’
FORMER AUSTRALIAN HEAD COACH Tim Nielsen makes this simple observation to describe his first impression from 2009, when Phillip entered the Australian Test team. The extraordinary thing is that even as a boy, Phillip knew it too.
All young Australian cricketers dream of the same thing. Macksville’s premier batsman set his goal early and privately, but was happy to share it with a chosen few. ‘It’s something I’ve always planned for. You want to get in there and get the job done very quickly,’ he admitted later.
Few doubted he would get there, but even fewer knew just how hard he worked. Every night of the week, summer and winter, he was at the Willis Street nets with his dad. With every trial match, every tournament, every hundred, every time he walked to the crease, he had to prove himself again.
This all-consuming ambition left little time for school. At Macksville High, a class teacher reported to Barry Lockyer that Phillip had told them not to harass him about an overdue assignment because it was cricket season. Lockyer, who doubled as cricket coach, was pretty sure the boy had his priorities right.
Phillip wanted to leave school early, but his parents were keen for him to stay and finish his Higher School Certificate, as Jason had. His Aunt Helen remembers having a quiet talk to him at a family function about keeping his options open.
‘He said, “I am going to play for Australia. Cricket is my life”. He was that determined.’
Any hope she had of convincing him to have a Plan B evaporated when she heard that quiet announcement.
‘School wasn’t for me,’ Phillip told Megan for one of her school assignments. ‘I didn’t really want a normal job.’
He and Shariful Islam spent a lot of time on the phone talking about their goals. ‘He had made up his mind at the age of 12 he was going to play for Australia,’ Shariful says. ‘When I look back, I see he made a choice at that age and was able to execute that perfectly.’
He did press on at school – because of cricket. Greg convinced him that there were good options through the school system to play representative cricket, and he accepted that. For the time being.
‘Once he got past Year Eight he was hardly there,’ Greg admits. ‘I think one year he did 15 trips between here and Newcastle, Wollongong and Bathurst in the summer period, and that starts to eat into your schoolwork. I think it was around Year Nine where out of seven weeks he was at school seven days, and the rest was cricket.’
The people who administered cricket had little sympathy. ‘They would do things like have state trials in Sydney the Monday after September school holidays finished,’ Greg says, ‘so that means Tuesday is also gone for the drive home, and they had Wednesday off for senior kids. It amazed me: a fortnight of holidays and they would do that.’
Phillip’s school report at the end of Year 11 confirms he had one interest only. ‘We are expecting a better effort from Phillip in 2006, despite his many sporting interests,’ class teacher Mr Bogema suggested. ‘He needs to improve his performance in Standard English, Industrial Technology and Senior Science. While we expect him to captain Australia some day, there is a remote possibility he may need to make a living like ordinary folk! Let’s work on all sides of the future.’
Greg concedes that a lot of parents wouldn’t have let their children miss as much school as Phillip, but he and Virginia could see his focus and his talent. ‘And, I have to admit, it was bloody enjoyable,’ Greg says. ‘For all the driving we did to all those carnivals, I can tell you that at least eight times out of ten I drove away with a hidden smile because he had done so well.’
Keeping track of Phillip’s centuries would have been hard work if he wasn’t doing it himself; he racked up his twenty-fourth by Year Ten at school. And school did fulfil Greg’s promise of throwing up cricketing opportunities. Phillip was top run scorer and Player of the Carnival at the Combined High Schools Championships on the central coast where he notched up 134 against the Western Area team, averaged 66 and was duly selected in the CHS First XI.
Leading his teammates onto the field as captain of the Under-15s NSW XI.
CHS cricket coordinator Damian Toohey says Phillip especially loved taking on teams from the cities. ‘Phillip loved playing at these carnivals and giving it to the city kids. He always played in a competitive fashion and was very respectful to everyone. Unfortunately at this time a lot of the people involved use to call the North Coast the Phil Hughes XI, which certainly was none of Phillip’s doing, but sections didn’t like that.’
In March 2004, as a 15-year-old, he impressed everybody at the NSW Schoolboys Lord’s Taverners Championships, scoring a century in a partnership with captain Usman Khawaja for the CHS Firsts.
‘I was playing first grade at the time,’ Khawaja says. ‘I was thinking, who is this little guy? He was hitting them to all parts.’
England opener Sam Robson ran into Phillip around this period. ‘I remember it clearly because of how much better he was than anybody else at that age. The guys in Sydney always fancied ourselves over the country boys. Playing grade was looked on as pretty impressive, playing with the men. All of a sudden Phil turned up and I was staggered. He played every single shot and was miles ahead, and he was from this little town that we’d never heard of.’
Usman, Ben Way and Ben Jonas were selected with Phillip for the NSW Schoolboys team, and he received the Steve Rixon Perpetual Trophy as Player of the Year. Because of his age, he was able to play again the following year and picked up the same award, this time shared with future first-class all-rounder Will Sheridan. (Phillip let Sheridan have the handsome trophy for a year.) The only other players to win it twice were Adam Gilchrist and NSW Sheffield Shield player Corey Richards.
Being younger than the other boys, Phillip returned for another shot at the Under-15s national tournament as captain of a NSW team that included his mate Shariful Islam. That year the carnival was held in Adelaide, a future happy hunting ground. He gave the locals a taste of what was to come with a record score for the competition: 166 not out against the Northern Territory.
Phillip’s love of batting was infectious. In that game, NSW lost two early wickets before Phillip was joined by Shariful, who recalls, ‘His hand–eye coordination was amazing. After one cut I said, “Man, what was that?” and he just said, “Yeah, well if he keeps bowling there I’m going to keep doing the same thing”. No batsman in that comp was able to play the shots that he did. I never saw a batsman in any of the other states who could bat even close to Phil. Bowlers were doing what they were trained to do and he was putting away their good balls . . . It was absolutely frustrating for the bowlers.’
The pair pinned their ears back, and Phillip’s scoring toward the end of the innings makes stunning reading: 4 2 2 2 1 1 2 4 4 4 4 1 1 4 4 2 1 1 4 2 2 1 2 4 2 2 1.
In his last 28 deliveries, he hit nine boundaries, made 64 runs, and failed to score off only one ball: the last.
Teammate Daniel Burns, who was watching that innings, remembers Phil getting down on one knee and scooping the bowlers onto the leg side.
‘It was like a switch getting flicked,’ Burns says.
He knew, however, that a Hughes innings could go through many phases. ‘He always batted at his own pace, he wasn’t rushed and didn’t panic and if you played against him and he got to 30 you knew you were going to pay. Sometimes it was a slow and painful death. He just knew so many ways to get to 100.’
Shariful and Phillip set a third-wicket partnership record of 175 before Shariful was dismissed for 62. Phillip’s 166 alone accounted for the Northern Territory, but it would also have been enough to win 11 of the matches in a week when wickets were damp and difficult. Phillip was equal top score (35) for NSW in the semifinal against Victoria, and his 33 in the final play-offs was the second-highest for the Blues.
‘The batting,’ the team report stated, ‘was disappointing, with only two batsmen performing consistently well. On and off the field all players behaved creditably at all times and the team spirit and cohesion was exceptional. Phillip Hughes performed his duties well as captain.’
Phillip’s reputation had become, says Victorian wicketkeeper Brett Forsyth, a distraction. ‘For the first two days of the carnival, we were playing on a ground next to where New South Wales was playing and we could see him batting and had wondered who the little bloke was . . . I remember him scoring over 150 in one game. We were just amazed that someone at that stage wasn’t scoring 40 or 50 or 60, but was batting all day and making big scores. That was the first we’d heard of him and then we played against him in the semifinal. I am pretty sure we had him caught out behind early but he wasn’t given out and we were getting into him. We had our plans in place, but he just kept cutting. I think he got 30 or 40 that day, even bowled a few seamers at the back of their innings. I am pretty sure he got me out that day.’
Brady Jones, the Tasmanian wicketkeeper, says: ‘There were rumours flying around about the kid from New South Wales who had scored so many hundreds and you just thought he was going to be this huge kid who was bigger than everyone and would belt everyone around, but he wasn’t. We thought he would be a man child . . . He was small, but he just did it.’
Mitchell Harvey bowled brilliantly in Adelaide. A left-arm quick from Dorrigo on the northern tablelands 75 kilometres north of Macksville, Harvey had played against Phillip for years.
‘I never got him out,’ Harvey says. ‘Growing up, he was the best batsman I ever saw. I played a lot of cricket at a high level and he was the outstanding player. He could just produce when he had to. There were kids from other states with big reputations, but he made them look secondary.’
Simon Keen, who would be Phillip’s state captain at Under-17 and Under-19 level, says Phillip’s feats were the talk of junior cricket. Another batsman told him of a time ‘Phil was slog-sweeping sixes all day . . . he was slog-sweeping for fun. All the other kids were making up theories about how he did it, like, he didn’t watch the bowlers, he just watched the middle of the wicket, that was his secret. There was a story that he learnt to bat by using an axe on his banana farm. He was already this bigger-than-life character.’
There was a prize at the end of the carnival that meant more to Phillip than any trophy. He was picked to play for an Australian Under-15 selection in a tournament against Indian and Malaysian teams in Delhi later that year. Cricket was luring the Macksville boy further afield.
