There are no beggars, monkeys, dancing bears, dusty pitches or squat toilets where Phillip Hughes comes from. In 2004, Macksville boasted a population of 2500. Where Phillip was going, that many people could squeeze into one city block.
INDIA IS AN ASSAULT on the western senses. Its streets swarm with people day and night, its air is as polluted as any on the planet, and it is a place of eternal noise, movement, colour and aroma. It shocked adult cricketers from the big Australian cities. How confronting was it for a 15-year-old country kid like Phillip Hughes?
The boys of the Australian 15 Years School Sports Association tour gathered in Sydney for a couple of days’ training before flying to India. They were put up at a Randwick hotel close to a fast-food outlet where one youngster from Macksville proved to be quite a hit with the local girls.
On 25 September the boys left those familiar things behind and flew to Delhi. To say they were ill prepared is an understatement.
‘It’s real hot here, smelly and dirty,’ Phillip informed his family in a postcard.
‘The food was not so good,’ he wrote in another letter.
Indian restaurants were scarce on the NSW north coast, and curries can be confronting for the uninitiated. His roommate on the tour, Daniel Burns, remembers the pair of them running for the toilet in the airport and being confronted for the first time in their lives with holes in the floor. No seats, no toilet paper, nothing they could recognise. Nonetheless, Phillip kept his mind open because it was cricket and a taste of what life on tour must be like.
‘Phillip and I just looked at each other, shrugged and laughed,’ Burns says. ‘He was like that for the rest of the tour. Other kids got homesick and let things get to them, but he just enjoyed it. Everything he saw he took in his stride.’
Keeping Phillip in cricket was a costly exercise. The trip was expensive, but the North Coast Cricket Council chipped in $500. Every time he made a new representative team, Greg and Virginia paid for the shirts, caps and jackets, petrol for the car ride and accommodation if the tournament wasn’t in Sydney where they had relatives. Then there were the expenses of being on the road.
The team’s coach, Damian Toohey, remembers raised eyebrows when Phillip was not named captain for the tour. ‘The national secretary had told us the selection committee had decided on Michael Hill and Kurt Pascoe. I don’t think this was well received in the Hughes house at this time, as Phillip had captained the NSW team. The most impressive part was his attitude in respecting the other boys. I think he had captained most teams he’d been in but he was relaxed being one of the boys. He led them shopping, and meeting other people, and creating stories. He had some mischief in him, but always respected what he was doing. He was funny in our pool recovery sessions, and he ordered lots of chips from room service, apparently.’
The kids found themselves on buses for hours in the morning trying to get to the ground and would arrive drained shortly before play. The same trip home would take a quarter of the time.
Bowling as much as batting won Phillip ‘Player of the Tour’ on his first Australian rep tour, a 2004 odyssey through India.
‘It was a tough trip,’ Burns says. ‘A lot of us were sick and the organisation wasn’t great, but Phillip just enjoyed himself.’
Daniel, Phillip and Mitch Harvey roomed together, the Macksville boy hammering room service and staring out the window in wonder at the mysteries of India. Other boys were confronted with the mysteries of two beds in a room for three people.
When asked about the tour a decade later, teammate Brett Forsyth’s memory is that Phillip was captain. ‘The thing that stood out was his leadership. I was pretty sure he was joint captain with Michael Hill . . . Those two were the most credentialled but I remember that Phil stood out in everything he did. Even if he wasn’t captain he was a leader, and any challenge, he took on. The personality didn’t change. He was always having a laugh, he just loved it, he was always happy to be there and I suppose that’s the thing I remember: a country boy with a mullet who just loved cricket and loved being there. The touring stuff didn’t bother him, he just loved being around the boys. A positive person. He was very driven, even at a young age. Most of us hoped we would do it but he knew he would. He believed in himself.’
Phillip in front of the Taj Mahal. He enjoyed the sights, not so much the food.
On arrival, still tired after their flight, the boys were taken to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Piled on a bus first thing in the morning, they were told it would take four hours to get there. It took eight. The vehicle pulled up at a questionable-looking north Indian roadhouse for lunch, but as they got off the bus the Malaysian team coach told his Australian counterpart not to let anybody eat the food. The bus wouldn’t stop again and made the return journey without once pulling up for food, despite pleas from one and all. They only returned to their hotel at 2 am.
There was a bizarre itinerary for the tour, which was organised by the Commonwealth Youth Sports Development Council. It involved a lecture and a play by local students about AIDS awareness, seminars on Commonwealth values and gender equity, plus factory visits and a reception with representatives from the Australian High Commission.
One by one, the young cricketers fell ill. It wasn’t until later that they realised the drinks they were given during games had been mixed with tap water. The boys would only eat naan bread for lunch, and, later in the tour, some of the fathers who made the trip would get food from a nearby pizza chain. Mitchell Harvey lost 14 kilograms on the tour; he reckons Phillip might have lost the same.
Like many first visitors to the subcontinent, it was the poverty the 15-year-olds found genuinely confronting. When one boy gave money to a beggar, he was given a stern warning by the liaison officer, who told the kids that beggars were professionals, and giving money only encouraged them. It was a moral dilemma none had faced before.
A colourful religious festival that passed the hotel enchanted the visitors, but when a man confronted them with a dancing bear on a chain one of the boys threw money at the handler and yelled at him, ‘I want you to dance, mate! Not your bear, YOU!’
Phillip wrote a postcard home during a trial game: ‘We had our first game today. I’m 44no. I was smashing them. The Taj Mahal was sick. I miss use so much I think I’m getting home sick, can’t wait to see you. Love you so much. Love Boof. PS keep ringing me.’
The boys struggled with cricket conditions so different from anything they had seen. It rained every night and the wickets were a challenge. The Indian spinners preyed on the batsmen while the Australian fast bowlers struggled in the humidity. Nobody was healthy. In the second game against Malaysia, Phillip saw the quicks struggling, grabbed the ball and took six for 24 from ten overs. He made 41 of the team’s 120 runs and took three catches, but the tourists were still beaten. It was his best performance of the tour.
Michael Hill remembers that Phillip ‘bowled these dreadful medium pacers – they barely got down the other end, and he took six wickets in one of the games and I think that was his best figures ever. I was captain and I bowled him the rest of the tour after that’.
Mitch Harvey describes Phillip’s bowling action as ‘horrible’: ‘He was looking at his feet when he let the ball go – it was almost like he bowled off the wrong foot.’
Daniel Burns says Phillip’s bowling was ‘a farce, it was really hilarious’. He has no memory of him bowling in the nets, but he recalls the almost wrong-footed action and the way he angled the ball in: ‘It barely bounced above ankle height, it was travelling so slow.’
As amusing as Phillip’s bowling was for his teammates, Toohey remembers him bowling Virat Kohli, already a star, for a duck.
Brett Forsyth was impressed with Phillip’s batting. ‘He just adapted so quickly to the conditions. Where for a lot of us it took us a long time on the spinning tracks, he would get out there and start sweeping from ball one and just took the game on.’
Damien Toohey saw that it was a result of hard work behind the scenes. ‘Against the new ball he was great. The interesting thing was our kids against spin, because the [Indian] kids bowl flatter and into the wickets. There was a lad who was about six foot who bowled around the wicket and into Phil’s pad, full and at good pace. Our kids grew up waiting for the ball to be tossed up and would come down the wicket, and he had to work out how he was going to bat against that. At that stage he wasn’t a good sweeper of the ball and he went away and practised and practised before we played them again. That was the sort of kid he was, you could see him sitting there thinking, “What am I going to do?”’
Toohey says Phillip seemed to be casing India for when he would return with more senior sides. He was moved to have an unusual heart-to-heart with the boy.
‘I do remember sitting Phillip down at our mid-tour review and saying to him, “You need to focus on becoming a first-class cricketer. You are that good”. [Team manager] Neil Findlay said to me at the time, “I’ve never heard you say that to a kid before”. I said, “He needed to hear that from us”. At the time I wasn’t sure if he was that focused off the field. It was his first trip without Greg, and I reckon he was cutting loose a bit.’
Phillip would always seek out the better players on the other side and try to engage them in conversation, hungry to learn more. Kohli says he remembers Phillip from that tour and later visits with Under-19s and an Australia A side. He, too, fell for the Hughes charm.
‘He was pretty excited to be where he was, playing for Australia, you could see that,’ Kohli says. ‘He was happy to be on the pitch and interacting with people that he liked. I never found him hostile. He was calm and quiet and friendly. He seemed happy to be doing what he was doing. You could see he loved batting.’
Phillip’s attitude to cricket and life made a profound impression on Brett Forsyth. ‘Once your cricket is finished, you let go of it all and move on, but some people you hang on to and he was one for me . . . he had this country thing, he was content, he wasn’t needy, he was firm how he went about things, but he had this infectious personality. I was a massive fan of him as a person and a player even when I was playing against him. It was also his mental application, the way he went about it. He didn’t worry about failure from what I could see; he just didn’t see cricket that way. He went out there and played the game and was positive, and that set him apart. He was inspiring, his personality. I wanted to be like him, I wanted to walk about without that fear and not worry if I was good enough or anything else. He didn’t have that fear of failure, which is a big thing in cricket. Everyone was comfortable with their talent, but the personality is what gets the player to the next rung.’
Burns was equally impressed with his roommate’s attitude and ability. ‘We saw Steve Smith and Usman Khawaja and David Warner when they were young, and he was head and shoulders above them in terms of junior cricket. He was the perfect teammate too. When I think about it, I realise there was never a time when you felt he wanted to be somewhere else or to be doing something else. He just wanted to be there. He was funny, relaxed, focused, and he never got cheeky with coaches. In the rooms after a game, he would be the first with a joke or a laugh and it didn’t matter if he’d made a duck or a hundred, he was always the same.’
By the last game in India, however, Phillip was exhausted and was excused from playing. He took to the dressing room and slept the whole day. Toohey says it was a hard choice. He thought they could win but he had to prioritise the boys’ health.
Phillip finished the series with 8 wickets at 13.25 and 135 runs at 33.75. His feats with the ball earned him the Bowler of the Series award. The Player of the Series was Kohli. Phillip’s peers voted him best player in the Australian squad. He was the complete all-rounder at this level. The squad needed a back-up keeper, so when he wasn’t taking wickets he would relieve Brett Forsyth behind the stumps.
‘Phil was sharing the gloves, leading the team when he needed to, and bowling. Whatever challenge he had, he just did it,’ Forsyth remembers. ‘He didn’t look like your traditional keeper, he probably had short sleeves on. It was bizarre. I saw him on TV when he took the gloves when Matthew Wade bowled in the Test in Tasmania [against Sri Lanka 2012–13] and the grin he had was exactly the same as the one I remember from India. It was Phillip having a laugh and saying, “How good is this?”’
On his return, Phillip wrote a letter of thanks to the North Coast Cricket Council, signed off, ‘Yours in Cricket. PHILLIP HUGHES 15’. He told them it was ‘good to be home to a baked meal’ and apologised for the delay in writing, ‘but I had an arm in plaster for three weeks due to a broken bone in my right hand’.
There was a story behind that.
The young cricketer had recently become a boxing fan and worshipped Anthony Mundine, a former rugby league star who had given up football to follow in his father’s footsteps as a boxer. The former world champion was a controversial figure, but, as Greg says, ‘Phillip didn’t know anything about politics’. He took to carrying a small picture of Mundine in his cricket kit and was intrigued by his hero’s craft.
After India, Phillip and Greg were training every night of the week at the Willis Street nets. Greg patiently set up the bowling machine while the boy got ready, and then he would feed in ball after ball after ball. They had more than 100 balls ready to go before reloading. Hardly a word was said. Occasionally Phillip wanted the balls aimed in a certain spot, but even that could be done with a gesture.
The nets weren’t in great shape. The wire developed holes and fell away in places. Later somebody would suggest that the club ask Phillip to fix them.
‘Why?’ they were asked.
‘Well, he wore them out.’
It was a fair point. The crooked structures still stand today and somebody has patched them up, but nobody is there on a winter afternoon, especially now that newer nets have been installed at the nearby Donnelly Welsh Playing Fields.
When Phillip was finished, he and Greg would pack up and drive to a local house where there was a gym and a punching bag.
‘Feel me muscles, Mum,’ he would announce with a grin.
A batsman, like a boxer, needs quick hands and feet. It was a truth coaches Warren Smith and later Justin Langer preached, and one the Macksville boy knew before he met either of them. He was, fortunately, blessed with both. That high back lift convinced bowlers in the split second after they released the ball that they were a chance, but in a blink the gate was closed, and the bat was colliding with the ball at the last possible moment, right under his eyes.
Sparring became a favourite activity and it was during a session with Jason, who was as strong and quick as Phillip, that a bone in the hand broke. Right on the eve of the cricket season. Jason can remember an incident in which he might have given Phillip a broken nose during a similar workout.
By 17, Phillip (right) was a NSW veteran – often as captain, usually as opening batsman.
Needing to get to Bowral for cricket trials, Phillip had the plaster removed two days before he had to bat. The family was told that he would need a doctor’s certificate clearing him. That was arranged and faxed off. The night before leaving, Greg gave him some throwdowns in the backyard. Phillip’s arm was weak and sore, but he didn’t let on.
‘We didn’t realise how much strength he’d lost,’ Greg recalls.
In a first practice match in Bowral, Phillip was run out for not many, which might have been a good thing, as he had to play against a City side the following day in a match called the Brett Lee Cup.
Matthew Day had first seen Phillip in the PSSA tournament when he scored 159 not out at Waitara Oval. As an opening bowler for City, Day had been hearing things about the country kid for years and they had occasionally crossed paths. The Country–City match in Day’s last year of Under-17s was Phillip’s first competitive game back from his broken hand.
Day recalls: ‘Our coach said, “Let’s test him out early”. I took the first over and the first three balls were bouncers. He went, four, six, four. He had fourteen after three! All pull shots. He was renowned for his cutting, but in junior cricket it was pulls, pulls, pulls. Everyone joked that the six had hit Bradman’s house. Phil said, “I think I’ve woken the old fellow up!”’
The Don, who had died three years earlier, would have been delighted to be disturbed from his eternal rest by an unorthodox country boy who was challenging the game with the weight of his talent and magnitude of his scores.
‘He slapped these guys,’ Greg remembers. He scored 120, but was in pain through the whole innings, and the coaches said he wasn’t allowed to field. City won, and Phillip was sent home and told not to play cricket for a month.
The 120 proved more than enough to ensure he was selected for NSW in the Under-17 National Championships. Again he was getting in early: he was young enough to qualify again 12 months later.
The layoff kept Phillip out of cricket up to Christmas, which gave him time to finish his school year and collect an award. He had decided to stay on at school beyond Year Ten, but the North Coast School Sports Association already awarded him a Sporting Blue, usually reserved for those in their last year. He received a certificate listing his achievements that concluded: ‘Phillip has set himself very high goals and seems destined to achieve them. Taking into account the size of his hometown, its isolation from first class sporting venues and limited competitive opportunities against boys of similar ability, one cannot underestimate the enormity of Phillip’s achievements compared with other boys from metropolitan centres across Australia. Congratulations on a well deserved “Blue” in the sport of Cricket.’
In January 2005, Phillip went to Tasmania for the Under-17 tournament. Greg would follow after attending to some business at home. Phillip missed out in the first matches against Victoria at New Town Oval and Queensland at R. Ferguson Park, but then Greg arrived for the third match against Western Australia at King George V Park in Glenorchy. The 16-year-old put on a show for his dad, scoring 114 – the exact winning margin for the Blues.
It was only a taste of what was to follow. The following day Phillip hit 160. NSW coach David Patterson sang Phillip’s praises to the Coffs Coast Advocate: ‘His cutting and cover driving was exceptional as were the shots he played off his pads. The best part about both his centuries was the way he hung in there as an opener when we were in trouble at 4–55 and 3–42. He really held the innings together.’
Phillip was named in the Under-17 Merit Team, made up of the best players in the tournament, but he was not considered for the Australian squad for the Under-19 World Cup.
His incredible form continued through that 2004–05 season. Having opted to play for Sawtell in the larger Coffs Harbour District Cricket competition, he found himself playing against Nambucca Bellingen in the Under-16s inter-district grand final. There were mutterings in the Macksville and Bellingen pubs about this new turn of events, but rules were rules, and Phillip was Phillip: he scored 129 not out to win the match.
A mentor to Test star Michael Slater, Wagga Wagga batting coach Warren Smith likened Phillip’s unorthodoxy to Bradman and Border.
At the 2005 NSW Schoolboys Championships in Barooga, batting for North Coast, he made 120 not out against Riverina and 107 against Sydney East (who had another up-and-coming young batsman by the name of Steve Smith, who responded with 60). South Coast defeated North Coast in round three and Phillip was out on his favourite number, 64.
When that was done Phillip pulled on the pads to bat for Sawtell against Coffs Harbour in the Coffs Harbour and District Cricket grand final alongside Jason. The match preview in the local paper claimed his nickname was ‘Superstar’. While that was not true, it may as well have been. Phillip’s efforts in that game are best recounted by Coffs Harbour Advocate journalist and Coffs Harbour cricket captain Brad Greenshields, who wrote about them four years later when Phillip was picked for Australia, under the headline ‘The Day I Knew Phil Hughes was Special’.
‘His reputation had preceded him. Nevertheless, being the captain of the opposition team I was quietly confident that the pressure of a first-grade grand final would be enough to unnerve someone of such tender years . . . Oh how wrong I was.’
Greenshields, like so many before and after, believed the best way to get the 16-year-old out was to keep off his pads and bowl an off-stump line to dry up his scoring opportunities. To that end he put in a slip, two gullies, third man, backward point, short cover and mid-off. The game was at Richardson Park, with beautiful views of the mountain ranges and an ocean breeze that takes the edge off the heat.
‘I don’t know why I even bothered,’ Greenshields wrote. ‘Hughes possesses a cut shot that could get through a gap in a budget surplus.’
Phillip didn’t show off; he just built up a steady half-century.
‘When Hughes rocked onto the back foot he looked like he had all the time in the world. His defence showed no sign of weakness and he hardly said a word, no matter how much my team tried to verbal him’.
Sawtell won the grand final and while Greenshields was disappointed to lose, at least he had a story to tell.
Hundreds were filling up the baskets in the back bedroom of the East Street home. Matt Day remembers, ‘The teams that got him in the first few overs, they got really pumped. When he got to 20, they’d get very deflated, because he was away, and he made hundreds for fun.’
Sam Robson was sitting with Phillip at a state Under-17 trial game in Canberra. ‘The guys were in the dressing room talking about how many hundreds they’d made. Someone would say two, or three, and someone would say six. Phil said he had made 50 or 60, an astronomical number.’
Despite all the centuries, things got confused the next summer and Phillip suffered a setback that, like many first rebuffs, left a deep scar. He was going so well, Cricket NSW told him that he should captain its Under-17s but also try out for the Under-19s, so he skipped trials for the first and went to the second, in Manly after the September school holidays. In the second trial in Blacktown he scored two Under-19 half-centuries, dominating alongside fellow left-hander Usman Khawaja. It should have been enough, but the Under-19s decided to have another trial the next day.
Phillip took a deep breath. ‘Now I have to prove myself again,’ he said to Greg. And he did, with another half-century.
When the NSW Under-19 team was read out, two words were missing: Phillip Hughes. The selectors had opted for Steve Cazzulino as an opener, even though Phillip had performed better in the trials. Cazzulino was picked on the strength of his runs for NSW Under-19s the previous season. Phillip was told he would be in the Under-17s instead. Cricket NSW had indicated that Phillip might play in both age groups, as all-rounder Moisés Henriques had done the previous season, but they changed their mind after talk that it was too much cricket for one boy.
Greg and Phillip were stunned. He was, after all, a batsman. Nobody had ever suggested Phillip Hughes would be better for less time at the crease.
Greg was perplexed. He had made two 1000-kilometre round trips for the trials, taking time off work that stretched his limited resources.
‘It was a very upsetting day,’ Greg admits. ‘Freddy [David Freedman, the Under-19 coach] was nearly in tears when he told him, “We are not picking you, we can only pick you in the Under-17s”. Phillip said nothing. I said, “Why is he at the Under-19 trials when you were never going to pick him?”’
But the Hugheses were not a family for ugly scenes. Part of the reason Phillip wanted his dad to never sit with other parents was that he disliked parental influence. The other players were also surprised. Matt Day recalls that Phillip ‘did incredibly well in those trial games at Blacktown and they didn’t pick him, which was a sore point for Phil and the family. They’re a country family who never had heaps of money. They’d come to a trial and he’d done really well. For them it was a big expense and no result’.
Usman Khawaja was also surprised. ‘It threw a spanner in the works, him making runs, because Steve Cazzulino had made a lot the year before and they had him and me down as openers. The coach pulled Phil aside and said he wouldn’t be picked. It was a hard thing for the coach to do.’
Cazzulino admits ‘it raised some eyebrows . . . That was the last time I got picked ahead of Hughesy’.
Performing at an Under-17s trial in Newcastle for Northern NSW, Phillip blasted the ball around the park for two days running. Another century in the bag. They were going to rest him for the third day and let some others have a bat, but it was rained out. Then it was off to play for North Coast in the Colts, where he got another century.
Freedman points out they had some fantastic batsmen in the team that year, but ‘I am happy to admit we got it wrong’. The Cricket NSW talent coordinator says Hughes, along with Moisés Henriques and Josh Hazlewood, were the best young cricketers he ever saw.
‘The thing about Phillip was he wasn’t aesthetically pleasing but it never compromised the way he played. He had an insatiable appetite for runs. We’d heard about him at the North Coast Zone academy and knew he was good by the mountain of runs he scored.’
NSW won the Under-17 carnival in January 2006. Phillip hit 259 runs, including three half-centuries, and was selected in the merit team. The Under-19 carnival was a chance of being chosen for an authentic Australian team. That was another reason why his non-selection hurt.
School cricket was a light workout these days, and in the spring of 2005 Phillip duly hit three centuries for Macksville High and would have got a fourth if he hadn’t been run out for 91. His last innings for his school was 115 not out – in a total of 134! He played cricket in the local competition again and was part of the Ex-Services Club A-grade side that beat the Nambucca Hotel team in the grand final at Thistle Park.
Michael Townsend, a fast bowler for the pub team, was bowling well that day. Phillip nicked one through slip and later in the over was ruffled by a short ball. Some say it hit the badge of his helmet, while the bowler says it skimmed past.
‘It’s funny, I never intentionally tried to bowl bouncers to anybody and I think that’s what surprised him,’ Townsend says. ‘Most of the times I bowled against him he had the wood on me, like he did on everyone, but that one day I was going all right. Then he did that to me.’
At Thistle Park, it was always a bit of a thing to aim the ball at the chook sheds over the on-side boundary. ‘I am a tail-end slogger like most fast bowlers, but I could never get it. It was cow corner for right-handers,’ Townsend says. ‘It was even more annoying that he cover-drove me into them. A few blokes got it in over the years. It is a fair hit, they were all right-handers, though. I’ve never seen it hit square that way he did it.’
The feathers went flying and the din from the chooks could be heard across Macksville.
The mild-mannered quick was so impressed, he congratulated the batsman. ‘I never got him out,’ Townsend admits. ‘My brother did. My brother was living in Sydney and they brought a team up from Strathfield to play and I was in Phil’s team; we had a selected team from the local comp. My brother was the fast bowler and he got him. He was pretty proud of that. He photocopied the scorebook and everything. He must have known things were coming.’
Like many opponents who had taken a beating from him, Townsend got on well with Phillip off the field. ‘My parents owned the Retravision store in town, and every now and then I would go and help the Hugheses with the computer at their place. Whenever he came home, he would come by the shop and ask you how you were going. He was a nice kid. He would approach you for a chat. You didn’t have to chase him down to say hello.’
Phillip scored 777 runs in A-grade that season; Jason proved difficult to remove and averaged 312.
‘They reminded me of a Steve Waugh–Mark Waugh type of thing,’ Townsend remembers. ‘Jason was a bit more flamboyant with his shots, a bit more like Mark Waugh, whereas Phil had his head down a bit more and concentrated on things.’
There was one last sour note that season. The trials for the NSW Combined High Schools side were held early in the summer, but the Hugheses found themselves trying out for the state Under-19 team in Sydney the day before and would have had to drive overnight to Lismore to make the game.
‘I needed to work at some stage and nobody else was going that way, so we couldn’t do it,’ Greg says.
Phillip just couldn’t get there.
The North Coast region ruled that as Phillip had not made the trials he was ineligible to play for CHS, despite the fact he had played the previous three years and been player of the carnival in the last two. It was patently ridiculous.
‘They were following their guidelines and there wasn’t much that could be done,’ Damian Toohey says. ‘I remember saying to Virginia, “Phillip has bigger fish to fry in cricket, and he will be doing great things”. I have no doubt if he had attended the carnival he would have batted for four days!’
The local scene had clearly grown too small, but Phillip had one last sign-off for Macksville Ex-Services Club, his club, in a game at Willis Street against Urunga. Phillip had accepted $100 to go to Port Macquarie and do the presentations for the junior cricket club the same afternoon. The Macksville team batted first, and Phillip got to his half-century when it became obvious that it was time to go.
‘He went berserk,’ Greg says. He swung the bat like he had nothing to lose. Six of his last 12 scoring shots went for six. The scoresheet shows the sequence: 4 2 4 2 6 1 2 6 6 4 4 1 6 1 1 6 6 6 1.
Sorry Urunga, there was somewhere he had to be.
