Rain was falling on Mona Park, a tree-ringed oval in Sydney’s western suburbs, when Neil D’Costa arrived to watch an Under-17 representative match in the 2005–06 summer. Or rather, D’Costa was there to watch a player. He had his doubts that play would start in the weather, but he was prepared to take the chance.
D’COSTA, AN EBULLIENT, FAST-TALKING former grade batsman, was club coach at Western Suburbs, one of several Sydney clubs who actively scoured country and junior cricket for new cricketers. Wests, the club of Bob Simpson, Alan Davidson, Greg Matthews and Warren Bardsley, battled with the St George club over bragging rights of having produced the most Australian Test cricketers out of any club in the country. St George, as well as Manly, were also chasing Phillip Hughes, but no club had a coach as persuasive as D’Costa.
He remembers the day well. ‘It was horrible and wet, but I’d told him I would go. The wicket was diabolical, but this little kid was hosing them out. He was small, but he was solid. He looked like a rugby league halfback. He was a muscly little fellow, and as a batsman he was so smart. He’d hit the ball and say “Two”, and it was always two. He competed – he played like a seven-year-old in the backyard against the kids from the street all the time. He had a sense of the game as a contest. He just wanted to get runs and win games.’
D’Costa came with some advantages over other club coaches. He was already well known as the mentor to Michael Clarke, who had burst onto the scene the previous year with a century on his Test debut in Bangalore and another in his first home Test in Brisbane. Clarke had subsequently struggled in the 2005 Ashes series and been dropped, but for young aspirants in Australia there was no more glamorous young cricketer than Clarke. He played for Wests.
An eye for talent. Neil D’Costa coaches Hughes at the Activate Cricket Centre at Breakfast Point in 2007.
D’Costa had other links to Phillip. He coached Shariful Islam, who had talked about the kid from Macksville since primary school days. ‘When Shariful came back from the PSSA championship,’ D’Costa remembers, ‘I said, “How did you go?” He said, “Pretty good, but you should see my best friend Phillip Hughes play.” I said, “How good can he be? Can he be better than you?” He said, “Oh, he’s much better than me.” This guy was peeling off hundred after hundred, so that got me wondering.’
By 2005, Shariful was Phillip’s number-one advocate at Wests. They were regularly talking by phone, and D’Costa introduced himself by jumping onto the calls.
Shariful remembers: ‘I always had it in my mind that Phil needed to be in Sydney. Phil needed to play grade cricket. I said to Dave O’Neil [a barrister and then Wests’ club president], “I have this person called Phil Hughes, he is amazing, have a look at his stats.” I explained to him the story from Under-12s to Under-15s. Neil didn’t know a lot about him. At a game one day, we sat down and I said, “We should recruit Phil.” They were asking me why, and I said, “This guy is going to be the next Don Bradman!” Neil did his research and looked at his stats and was very impressed. Then Dave said, “We need to do what we can to bring him to the club”.’
Shariful was straight on the phone to Phillip. ‘Look, mate, you have got to come to Sydney, you have to play grade. I know that you are young, but you have to play here.
Shariful also played the Clarke card, suggesting that the rising star of Australian cricket could be a valuable friend and mentor at Wests. ‘Because Phil and I had that bond, he did trust what I said. He knew that I always had his best interests at heart. I said, “There are a couple of ways you can look at it. You are in a comfort zone playing for country teams and doing well, but I think you need to test yourself if you want to play for Australia. The guys in Sydney are more experienced and you will be playing against players who have been playing grade cricket for a long time.”’
Briefed by Shariful, D’Costa watched Phillip bat at Mona Park in the rain then invited him and Greg to a first-grade match between Wests and Randwick–Petersham at Petersham Oval in January 2006. D’Costa also brought Moisés Henriques, the 18-year-old captain of the Australian Under-19 team and Phillip’s future NSW and Australian teammate. While Phillip and Moisés chatted, Neil spoke with Greg and organised lunch at the Pine Inn, a pub on Parramatta Road in Concord.
As they took a table, D’Costa, always direct and provocative, asked Phillip how ambitious he was.
Phillip looked him in the eye and said, ‘Play as high as I can.’
D’Costa, who loved a game of any kind, recognised that he and Phillip were in a kind of light-hearted shoot-out.
‘How high?’ D’Costa fired back.
‘Play for Australia.’
‘Where do you want to play?’
‘Replace Matty Hayden.’
Greg laughed. Phillip and D’Costa did not. Hayden, in 2005–06, was a giant of Australian cricket, with 79 Test matches and nearly 7000 runs to his name. He was 34, but after a difficult 2005 Ashes campaign had returned to form against the West Indies and South Africa at home that summer, scoring four centuries and averaging 73.
D’Costa replied, ‘If that’s your goal, then come to me. If that’s not your goal, we can finish lunch and go our separate ways.’
He was prepared to take Phillip Hughes as seriously as the boy was taking himself.
Phillip (on one knee without his cap on) with his NSW Under-17 teammates in Tasmania.
‘I knew what he could do,’ D’Costa says now, ‘but the question was, could he get comfortable in Sydney, could he stay out of trouble?’
Outside the pub, Phillip got in the car and told Greg he wanted to go to Wests.
‘Neil was very good, very switched on,’ Greg remembers. ‘NSW weren’t offering rookie contracts yet, but Neil said to Phillip, “You’re not ready for first-class yet but we’ll make you ready”.’
Another of D’Costa’s strengths was how quickly he could organise contacts to make logistical arrangements. Although Phillip could take or leave his last year of school, the adults felt it was important for him to do his HSC. D’Costa sprang into action, calling Dr Ian Paterson, headmaster of Homebush Boys High and a keen cricket parent, to get Phillip enrolled. Shariful was already attending the school, so Phillip would have a friend close by. Acquainted with the developer of a new housing complex at Breakfast Point on the Parramatta River near Concord, D’Costa also organised for Phillip to move into a unit with Matt Day and another Joey’s old boy, Matt Costello. Within the month, Phillip’s move was under way.
‘I wanted to get to the city as soon as I could,’ Phillip would tell journalist Mike Coward in 2009. ‘I knew if I wanted to be a professional cricketer and play at the top level, I knew I had to move to Sydney and I thought to myself the sooner the better to get down to the big smoke.’
D’Costa, whose cheeky nature was a good match for Phillip’s, was ecstatic. He got to work practising with Phillip but could not resist a crack at his rival Andrew Fraser, the leading light at the Manly Cricket Club, who had also been seeking to sign Phillip.
One day when he was with Phillip, D’Costa phoned Fraser and asked, ‘Who’s that kid from Macksville?’
‘Phillip Hughes,’ Fraser said. ‘He’s coming to us, he’s going to be great!’
‘Yeah. I was just talking with someone about him. I’ll put him on.’
D’Costa handed Phillip the phone.
‘G’day.’
‘Who’s that?’ Fraser said.
With teammate and future Australian captain Steve Smith, opening for NSW Under-17s at Bankstown Oval.
Phillip (front) taking the field for a NSW Under-17 one-dayer at Mona Park, Auburn.
‘Phillip Hughes.’
D’Costa grabbed the phone and chuckled, ‘You’re not so confident now, Frase, are ya!’
As it had been in junior cricket, stories built up around Phillip Hughes as soon as he moved to Sydney. David O’Neil took a phone call from St George’s cricket manager John Jobson.
‘Congratulations,’ Jobson said.
‘For what?’
‘You’ve got Phil Hughes. He’s the best young batsman we’ve seen. We were interested, but I knew it was over when a big limousine came to pick him up that D’Costa had organised.’
O’Neil’s brother, Chris, another Western Suburbs cricketer, had died in 1998, and a scholarship was set up in his name to help country cricketers move to Sydney. Some of these funds were put aside to assist Phillip.
‘Like all clubs, we have our strengths and weaknesses,’ David O’Neil says, ‘but we were very good at bringing new players into the fold.’
D’Costa rarely brought young cricketers to meet O’Neil at his chambers, but he made an exception with Phillip. D’Costa sat him down in front of the lawyer–president and said, ‘This is the bloke to come and see if you get into trouble. Not that you will get into any.’
Full days of attending school with cricket practice before and after kept trouble at arm’s length. Dr Paterson picked Phillip up from home and took him to meet D’Costa at the nets.
‘He was really proud of his first week, that he attended every class,’ Matt Day says. ‘His uniform was immaculate. He loved ironing. That was the one household task he did do. His shirt and pants looked great.’
Phillip never compromised on looking dapper. The next year, he attended the Cricket Australia Centre of Excellence on a residency program in Brisbane. His fellow student Michael Hill recalls, ‘We were 18 or 19 years old and away from home and single. Every Friday and Saturday night, we would be waiting for Hughesy ironing his shirt. He would change his shirt three or four times, change his hair three or four times, he always wanted to look good. We never left on time.’
Hughes’s care for his appearance had a reason: he liked girls who liked boys who looked good. He liked girls a lot. But during his first week going to school in Sydney, he was puzzled and disappointed about one thing. He phoned his cousin Nino and said, ‘It’s good, but there’s no girls here.’
Nino laughed. ‘Did the name Homebush Boys not give it away?’
D’Costa says that this was another reason he had wanted Phillip to go to that school, ‘to keep him away from the girls, which worked, for a little while anyway’.
Sometimes D’Costa picked him up after school and dropped in on Dr Paterson to ask how Phillip was going.
‘He’s not exactly a good student, Neil.’
‘He doesn’t have to be a good student. Is he turning up?’
Dr Paterson nodded. The quality of Phillip’s schoolwork was in inverse proportion to the quality of his cricket, but his charm instantly won over everyone, from the headmaster down.
After Phillip’s schooling was sorted, it remained for Wests to have him registered and graded so that other clubs would give up any hope of luring him away. The last game of the 2005–06 season was against St George, and rather than have him travel to the first-grade away game, Wests decided to play him in second grade at Pratten Park, their home ground, where a welcome barbecue would be put on after the match.
D’Costa picked Phillip up from Breakfast Point, and gave him a hit on the Pratten Park wicket before having breakfast. The last over of the one-day fixture is something of a Wests legend. St George batted first and scored 250. Phillip opened, and at the beginning of the fiftieth over he was 135 not out and the scores were tied. The bowler was Steve Green, a future first-grade regular. His first five balls to Phillip were dot balls. Some witnesses say Phillip did it on purpose, to build the tension, while others say he smashed each ball straight to a fieldsman. Either way, it came down to the final ball of the day, which Phillip hoisted over the mid-wicket fence into what might one day be called the Phillip Hughes Nets.
‘That’s how he rolled,’ D’Costa laughs.
Through the winter, D’Costa worked with Phillip on aspects of his technique at the Activate Cricket Centre at Breakfast Point, later co-owned by another Wests player, Ash Squire.
‘He was the first player to hit in the nets once they were finished,’ Squire recalls. ‘I had to kick him out because the glue on the carpet was still setting . . . Net 5 was always his – he didn’t want anyone else to use it. I had to tell him I had to run a business!’
Phillip ‘The Charmer’ (middle) with his school friends at Homebush Boys High.
Concentrating on Phillip’s technique, D’Costa ‘didn’t buy into the idea that it was unorthodox. It was a different package, but everything was in the right place at the critical moment. Experience was what he needed, not technique.’
D’Costa didn’t want to mess with Phillip’s instinctive appetite for runs.
‘What I brought was working on his angles. He played too much through and behind point. We had to straighten up his defence and get him working on his on- and off-drive and cover-drive. He had a three-finger pinch grip with his bottom hand. His left pinkie didn’t touch the handle. It was on the side, like playing a flute. We turned that bottom hand down into more of a tennis grip. Otherwise he couldn’t hit a full ball through the leg-side.’
There were also weak spots in his back-foot game. ‘When he played off the back foot to a hip-high ball, he was hopping back and his weight ended on his front foot,’ D’Costa says. ‘We helped him step and slide. Mark Taylor and Mark Waugh played that shot the best. Watch the ball in, watch it out. Get his head still. Turn his elbow over.’
This was a project of D’Costa’s for years to come: a mixture of not getting in the way of Phillip’s strengths but working hard with him on his weaknesses. D’Costa also took him frequently to Michael Clarke’s unit at Breakfast Point to talk about cricket and how to train.
‘The fact that he was playing at my club made him automatically my friend,’ Clarke says.
Clarke had broken back into the Australian team for the tour to South Africa and Bangladesh early in 2006, and created a deep impression on Phillip with his fanatical dedication to his preparation, which was now aimed at the 2006–07 Ashes series.
He didn’t need to try too hard, as Phillip already idolised him. ‘I didn’t know that he would take a picture of me to the hairdresser in Coffs Harbour and ask for the same haircut,’ Clarke laughs. ‘As it happened, I also knew the hairdresser and that’s how I found out. Hughesy would love telling me that story all the time, and I was saying, “No, don’t tell anyone!”’
The first of many English summers, this time with a NSW youth team in June 2007.
In June and July, Hughes went to England with a New South Wales youth team for nearly four weeks. His group included previous underage teammates, including Day, future Test fast bowler Jackson Bird, Steve Smith and Sam Robson.
‘It was a great few weeks and a lot of us remained friends,’ Robson says. ‘When you go away with someone, you know them for the rest of your life, you’ll always have those memories.’
Day remembers Phillip’s conversations with other players. ‘It was mainly cricket and girls for Phil. Everyone liked him. When we talked cricket, it wasn’t about past players or the game as a whole, it was about what we did today, what we were going to do tomorrow. Sam Robson was the complete opposite: he knew every stat.’
During his HSC year, Hughes was in the unit with Day and Costello one night. He came out of his bedroom and said, ‘I’ve got to write an English HSC essay tomorrow on a book I haven’t read. What am I going to do?’
Costello got him to locate the book in his school bag. The three of them read the blurb on the back cover before Day and Costello jotted some ideas for the essay.
‘I’ve never seen anyone study like that in my life,’ says Day.
The three young men were accepted into the little community around their home – the IGA supermarket, the Breakfast Point Country Club and the Palace Hotel, the pub across Tennyson Road into which Phillip was warmly welcomed.
‘The publican looked after us, the locals all knew us and kept an eye out for us. It was a good community to be part of,’ Day says. ‘With the unit, it was a brand new development so to have three young guys moving in was a bit of a concern. But Neil told them we were serious about sport and the unit would be fine. We paid the rent upfront and it was all fine.’
With the 2006–07 cricket season approaching, Phillip managed to get through his HSC exams and prepare for his first-grade debut for Wests against Manly at Manly Oval. It was in the lead-up to this game that he met Daniel Smith, the Wests first-grader, NSW state player and punishing right-handed batsman who, though seven years older, would become an influential and beloved member of his inner circle.
‘We became friends pretty much straightaway,’ Smith says. I had been around for a while, and took it upon myself to make new guys feel welcome. Matty Day was a friend too. We hung out and trained together, and it went from there.’
In that first game at Manly, Smith watched Phillip closely. ‘He was pretty nervous and hadn’t come out of his shell. Off the field, he was almost timid. But when he walked out there, you could tell he believed. He made about 70 and we felt we had a good one. There was something about him. We didn’t know how far he’d go. We just felt we had a good one for the club, and if he went beyond that, anything more was a bonus.’
Through the club season, however, Phillip struggled to adapt to the intensity of adult cricket in the city. His heart was still in Macksville: Ash Squire remembers that when Phillip’s Western Suburbs mates took him out to a nightclub, The Ranch, in Epping, on his eighteenth birthday, ‘the first thing he wanted to do was step outside and phone his dad’.
The homesickness took time to fade, and made for a tough first season at Wests.
‘He was quiet but keen to learn as much as he could about the game. He picked your brain and did that with a lot of guys,’ Daniel Smith says.
Opening with Steve Phillips, who was Michael Clarke’s best friend and a mate of Phillip as soon as he met him, he averaged in the thirties but did not feast on adult bowling as he had in the past. The standard was considerably higher, as Shariful had promised. Later, Phillip would say that this period of adjustment was one of the hardest of his career.
Back home in Macksville with Dad and Mum, cutting the cake for his 18th birthday.
Under-age cricket offered some relent. In midsummer, he went to Adelaide to play in the Australian Under-19 Championships, where his captain was Simon Keen and his teammates included Day, Robson and Steve Smith. Stepping down to teenage bowlers, he scored 324 runs at 54, came third in the overall averages and fourth in the aggregates against players up to two years his senior, and helped NSW to a first-place finish.
A highlight of his tournament was at the Pembroke School ground in Kensington against Western Australia, whose opening bowler was the towering future Australian paceman Nathan Coulter-Nile.
Picking the gap with a trademark punching cover-drive at Mona Park.
‘Before I even saw him in the Under-19s, my father’s mate had watched him in Queensland. He said Phillip Hughes was going to play for a long time for Australia,’ Coulter-Nile says. ‘He was definitely a class above the rest of the Under-19s.’
Phillip opened the batting, lost his partner David Murphy for 40 and then Steve Smith for a duck, but set about a huge partnership with Keen, who came in just before lunch. As they walked off the field for the break, Phillip said to his partner, ‘I just want to get back out there. Why do we have to stop?’
Keen says, ‘Other guys would have been satisfied with however many he’d scored, but Phil would never let the bowlers off.’
As Phillip proceeded to score 167 off 208 balls, adding 195 with Keen, the bowlers were tormented, among them Coulter-Nile.
‘Bowling to him showed me how hard it was to bowl to guys without any weaknesses. He cut the ball off the off stump, right where you wanted to bowl. He was the hardest batsman to bowl to, because he’d be 20 not out before you were forced to change your line to leg stump, and by then he was away.’
The innings set up NSW for their win in the tournament, and embedded Phillip in the minds of players in other teams, including future top-level teammates Matthew Wade, James Pattinson, Kane Richardson, James Faulkner, Nathan Lyon and Mitchell Marsh.
Robson was in awe of that 167. ‘I remember that game clearly. It was a massive score, but for him it had become the norm. Anyone there, if you asked them who were the best players, they would have said Phil for sure. His ability to make big hundreds at that age set him apart. He was certainly confident in his ability and you could tell that deep down he had the confidence I imagine that champion players have. He was very quiet though, not up himself, very much one of the boys.’
Back in Sydney, however, things were not flowing. After the encouraging first game at Manly, he had scored few half-centuries and not one hundred. D’Costa would drop in on games to watch him, and leave thinking only of new facets to work on. Through the week, he was drilling Phillip with practice and fitness work in the gym at Wests Leagues Club at Ashfield. Phillip was working hard but not producing results.
D’Costa sometimes resorted to shock tactics. ‘I’d never yell at Phil in front of anyone else, but I went over to his place and made a big show of saying, “What are you doing? Do you want to play for Australia? If you don’t want to, you can go to Macksville and stop wasting my time!”’
Towards the end of the season – D’Costa reckons it was the game after that grilling – something clicked. Wests were facing Bankstown in a two-day semi-final away from home. Bankstown’s attack included future NSW representatives Aaron Bird, Scott Thompson and Keen. On the first day, Hughes scored 140 and Wests were three for 300.
‘That was the moment he changed,’ Day says. ‘He felt he belonged and could dominate first grade.’
Keen remembers the day vividly. ‘Neil D’Costa had told him not to play the pull shot. He grafted his way to 100 without much flair. At 100, he loosened up with the most unbelievable shots of all time. I was saying, “Where do I bowl? Can the captain please take me off?” Generally, we just hoped we could be bowling to him on a day when he’d decided to graft. He’d make a hundred either way, but a good day for us was when he wanted to work on something in his game and get his hundred slowly.’
•
THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE OF cricket is the tales players tell about each other, and Phillip Hughes, while quiet, was already the focus of yarn-spinning on the Sydney scene. Because of how rapidly his career accelerated, he would not play a great deal of first-grade cricket in Sydney, but Hughes stories began spawning.
One story involved a club game the day after the Under-19 Championships in 2006–07. After a night out celebrating, Hughes and Day caught a 6 am flight from Adelaide to Sydney, where they were expected to play a first-grade game the same day against Campbelltown at Raby Oval, on the city’s south-west fringe. Day’s parents drove the weary boys to the ground, where they discovered a fast green wicket, a fierce Campbelltown attack, and a lost toss. Phillip was permitted to bat down the order, but it didn’t matter: Wests were soon five for 40 and Hughes and Day were the next men in.
‘We batted so badly they couldn’t get us out,’ Day says. ‘We were nicking to slips and they’d drop us. They realised how badly we were travelling. Their opening bowler Mitchell Claydon was running in, flapping his wings at us like a bird, but we just couldn’t get out. We laughed and laughed the whole time. In an hour and a half, Hughesy might have got 30, and I might have got three or four. They got stuck into us and still couldn’t get us out.’
Daniel Smith tells another story about Phillip’s lucky streak in club matches. ‘We were playing at North Sydney on a very ordinary wicket, chasing 170. I said to him, “I’m not going to last if I bat properly out here. I’m going to swing from the hip.” He did the same and we ended up putting on 140 in 12 or 13 overs. We both got out for 70 and were sitting on the sidelines feeling pretty happy with ourselves. We ended up scraping through seven or eight down, so maybe we didn’t quite take ownership of it.’
Things didn’t always go their way. Sydney University were a top-performing club with rising and established players such as Greg Mail and Ed Cowan, and also the redoubtable Greg Matthews. Now at veteran age, the one-time Wests legend dismantled grade teams for the students with his unique mix of guile and chatter. Phillip didn’t care about names but Matthews had a fair bit to say about the young boy’s reputation as the next big thing. Phillip responded by hitting him for two fours off his first two balls. Then Matthews got him out.
Matthews walked alongside him all the way off. In a loud voice, knowing that Greg had driven down from Macksville and was watching from the fence, Matthews said, ‘I don’t mind, but the guy I feel sorry for is your dad. All you’ve cost me is eight runs, but you’ve cost him a hundred bucks in petrol money to get down here!’
Fruity verbal exchanges have always been part of Sydney first-grade cricket, and Phillip was often on the receiving end. Usually, though, his adversaries were not crowing over success like Matthews, but ranting in exasperation. It wasn’t limited to his batting.
Day tells a story of Phillip’s moment of glory as a bowler for Wests. ‘He was a horrible bowler, but in that Under-15s tour to India he’d got bowler of the tournament, and he clung on to that as his bowling achievement. One day at Wests I was captain and he was nagging and nagging me all day for a bowl, and I kept saying, “You’re kidding yourself, you can’t bowl”. We’d spent all day in the field and got a few wickets at the end. The opposition was nine wickets down and he said, “Come on, give us the last over, you’ve got to give me a bowl now”. So I did, and his first ball got hit for four. His second nearly bounced twice but the bloke missed it and it bowled him. The batsman’s language, swearing at Phil all the way off the field, made it even funnier.’
When it came to sledging, Phillip was a non-participant. On a NSW Under-17 trip to Hobart, at the light-hearted end-of-match fines meetings, nobody could think of anything to fine him for. In the end, they invented the ‘Church Mouse’ fine for him, and he had to pay $2 for not saying a word all day.
Many would attribute his silence on the field to his kind nature, but others think that Hughes simply accepted that he was no good at sledging, which often requires a quick verbal wit. At the end of his first season at Wests, he represented the Australian Under-19 team in five matches against Pakistan Under-19s in Brisbane and Caloundra. His captain was Keen, and his teammates included Day, Coulter-Nile, Robson and Hill. The Pakistan captain was future Test opener Ahmed Shehzad, and an enthusiastic talker. He gave a serve to most Australian players, whether he was batting or in the field. In one of the games, Pakistan lost three early wickets. Shehzad was at the other end, and Phillip finally lost patience. Having held his silence, he walked up to Shehzad and said, ‘It’s all on your shoulders now, come on, let’s see how good you are!’
Shehzad gave the small boy a contemptuous glare and said, ‘Lucky I have big shoulders.’
Unable to think of a comeback, Phillip retreated. He’d proved to himself why he didn’t sledge. His approach was, “I don’t need to say anything because I’ll do it with the bat”. And he did.’
Opening the innings for NSW v Victoria in the Under-17s final at Bankstown Oval.
Phillip at training with the captain of the NSW Under-17s, Manjot Singh.
That Australia–Pakistan tournament was another watershed, showing how far ahead of his contemporaries Phillip was. The bowlers included whippy left-armers Mohammad Amir and Junaid Khan, both soon destined for the Pakistani Test team, bracingly fast and possibly not quite under 19. Opening the innings, Phillip scored two centuries and two fifties, averaging 96.75 and guiding Australia to their 3–2 win. No other batsman on either side scored a hundred.
‘Amir was the same size he is now and really fast,’ says Robson, ‘but it was no problem for Phil. Batting with him, he was really determined but also laidback and calm. He was clearly the best player on either side.’
Keen, who was rooming with Phillip, remembers that ‘playing days were always his happiest. He’d wake up with a big smile on his face, he couldn’t wait to play. I’d say, “Another hundred today, braz?” He had his cheeky grin. “Yeah, braz.” His attitude was, “I’m not going to boast about it, but that’s what I’m going to do”.’
That winter, his first out of school, he settled in at Breakfast Point and frequented the Palace Hotel with his close mates including Daniel Smith, Day and builder Lloyd Andrews, who knew him through Neil D’Costa and became a friend he would see or speak to on a daily basis. Occasionally Jason, who had followed Phillip to Western Suburbs but was living with an aunt on the North Shore, would join them and spend the night sleeping on the floor of Phillip’s unit. Sometimes the boys would arrive at the Palace to find Steve Smith waiting on the doorstep, a long way from his home in Menai, saying he would like a steak and a punt but, being underage, he wasn’t allowed in anywhere else.
The boys got up to boys’ tricks. Annoyed by a ‘No Parking’ sign outside the Breakfast Creek development that had no obvious reason, Phillip and his mates swung on the sign until the cement block came out, put it in their car and swapped it for a two-hour parking sign nearby, which they had also ripped out of the pavement. The space near their home remained a two-hour zone for years. Phillip had a keen eye for fun but, being so quiet, was the least likely to get caught.
Money was always tight. The NSW rookie contract that he was offered during 2007 netted $11,000, which he supplemented with a job at Wests Leagues Club at Ashfield.
University was never an option – when his HSC results arrived, he joked to his flatmates, ‘If you add all my marks up, I get nearly 100!’ – but he had set himself on the course of professional cricket, which meant, at this speculative age, relative financial hardship.
His total after-tax income that year was $192 a week. Virginia would send him envelopes of banknotes from Macksville. It was a bread and water lifestyle. Typically, whenever a care package from Virginia arrived, he would shout his mates dinner, in return for the many times they bought for him.
Phillip remained extremely quiet and polite among strangers. Wests Leagues Club gave him a job behind the bar, but he was too timid. He was moved down to the cellar, managing deliveries, which he enjoyed, fitting in shifts around his training and playing commitments.
He was away a lot that winter, with a stint at the Centre of Excellence in Brisbane (the Australian Cricket Academy had moved from Adelaide and been renamed in 2004), bracketed by a tournament against emerging players’ teams from India, South Africa and New Zealand in July and a two-week tour to Chennai, India, in August. He scored consistently rather than heavily until the last match in Chennai, where he made 107 against a Tamil Nadu adult team and added 170 for the first wicket with one of his new friends, Ed Cowan.
Hughes’s longest-standing mates say that he kept a dividing line between them and the friends he picked up through cricket. He played so much, he came into the lives of hundreds of cricketers through the years, and not all could be his best mate.
D’Costa says, ‘In a lot of those junior teams, he didn’t talk much, and the rest of the time he was batting. No-one knew Bradman because he was always batting. Before he was eighteen, Phil would go to the game, score runs, and go home to bed. His teammates loved him because he was winning games for them and then being so modest he wasn’t walking around telling everyone how good he was.’
But he also had a powerful gift for making friends, and as Day says, he established close bonds with fellow cricketers he regarded as ‘genuine people’. ‘He didn’t like people he thought were fake.’
He made no discrimination based on anyone’s background, but took them as he found them. This won him friends who might have seemed unlikely at first. Matthew Wade, the Victorian wicketkeeper, had antagonised the NSW players during under-age championships, and Day says he was always ‘butting heads’ with Wade. But at the Centre of Excellence, Wade and Hughes became friends for life.
‘We hit it off straightaway,’ Wade remembers. ‘We had similar builds, so we were put in drills together. He said he flogged me. When we had to go for a run, he was the first to get his shirt off. He was pretty happy with his rig! We also worked on wicketkeeping together, but I never got the vibe that he wanted to do it at the next level. Everyone knew he was going to be an outstanding batter, and that was what he was focused on.’
As he rose in the cricket world, Phillip attracted sponsors. The Callen Cricket sponsorship had been superseded by Sommers, Kookaburra and Adidas, and Wade laughs at the memory of going into Phillip’s room later in their careers. ‘It was all lined up: pairs of shoes, pairs of cricket spikes, more bats than you could poke a stick at. And it had to be just the way he wanted it. He was really fussy about his gear. When you went near it, he’d say: “Don’t touch that!” I saw that as an invitation and used to take the mickey out of him by moving his gear around or touching his bats. He hated it!’ His roommates while at the Centre of Excellence were West Australian wicketkeeper Luke Ronchi and Victorian batsman Aaron Finch. ‘I’d heard about this 18-year-old superstar,’ Finch says, ‘but being Victorian, I was sceptical. When I arrived at the apartment we were living in, he’d taken the biggest room and had hung all his things in the wardrobe. He had this massive beaming smile and said, “G’day, I’m Phil, I got here an hour before you, so I’ve taken the big room”. He had so much charm you had to let him get away with it. From that moment, we got on like a house on fire.’
Another example of his gift for friendship was Ed Cowan. By background and personality, Cowan might as well have come from a different planet. An old boy of the privileged Cranbrook School in Sydney’s east and a protégé of the English cricketer, writer and broadcaster Peter Roebuck, Cowan was a polished, educated, literate individual seven years Hughes’s senior. But they recognised something of each other’s quiet determination and history of being underestimated, small left-handed openers who were anything but replicas of Matthew Hayden. Their friendship would grow strong near the end of Phillip’s life, but when they first met at the Academy, they clicked via their work ethic.
Cowan ‘found him very quiet but comfortable. He wasn’t cocky, just comfortable with how he batted. I fed endless balls to him at the Academy. I didn’t understand how he hit some of the shots he hit, but he was comfortable in how he played.’
Cowan soon saw that there was more to him than met the eye. ‘He was a little person but even at the Academy he squatted huge weights. He was a strong bugger, and he was fit, and he wanted success. He snuck under people’s guards because of his laidback attitude, but he wanted to be the best.’
The 2007 tour to India, Cowan says, was ‘my first understanding of his hunger to score runs. A lot of kids are talented, but he had a mind for it. It was hot but not stupidly hot, you-couldn’t-step-outside hot. But it was testing, and he made this absolutely beautiful hundred. It was so enjoyable seeing someone really special coming through.’
Wade still marvels at the Chennai century. ‘I’d never seen a player play some of the shots he played.’
But by leading the AIS team to a win in the match, Phillip had created a problem. Based on the results achieved by previous intakes, the young Australians would not have been expected to make the final of the tournament, so Cricket Australia had booked their flight home between the semifinal and the final. But this year was a particularly strong one. Due largely to the 170-run stand between Phillip and Cowan, they had made the final against Mumbai, but were scheduled to fly out first. A meeting was held and, says Wade, ‘We were out of there. But we had to forfeit the final.’
At that stage the Centre of Excellence was very much a finishing school for first-class players, so Phillip, who had only played grade and underage cricket, had been taken in for his potential rather than his experience. It was growing clear that even though he had only made one Sydney first-grade century, he was in the NSW selectors’ sights. He only had to produce runs to get his chance.
The 2007–08 summer would be one of changing landscapes in Australian cricket. Shane Warne, Justin Langer, Damien Martyn and Glenn McGrath had retired from the Test team the previous summer, and Adam Gilchrist was soon to follow. The effects would ripple through state cricket. While promoting new candidates into their Test places, a concerned hierarchy was keen to search for the next generation of Test batsmen to follow the experienced incumbents such as Ricky Ponting, Hayden, Mike Hussey and Simon Katich. Rising batsmen were at a premium, most of all if they were young.
Phillip started the season with a flurry of runs that saw him promoted to the level immediately below Sheffield Shield. His 221 runs in six innings helped the Sydney Central team to the final of the State League Cup, a combined-club tournament where he played alongside Daniel Smith and Day, among others, and first came into competitive contact with many future teammates and friends including Peter Forrest, David Warner, Steve O’Keefe, Tom Cooper, Ben Rohrer, Trent Copeland and Beau Casson.
Casson, the left-arm wrist-spinner who would, within months, be the Australian selectors’ choice to fill the gap left by Shane Warne, has a strong memory of bowling to Phillip in the State League Cup and offers an insight into a left-arm wrist-spinner’s dilemma. Spinning the ball away from the left-hander with his stock ball, Casson worried that he might be feeding the Hughes cut shot.
‘His hours and hours of practice gave him a fearless personal belief. Playing against him, you felt that. I tried to bowl straighter and make him play against the spin. I thought I was half a chance with his slog sweep. History shows I wasn’t! If I erred to leg, he hit me. I’d float one up and think, “That’s not a bad ball”, but he’d hit it over mid-wicket with that slog sweep. But if I went wider, it was his bread and butter.
‘He cut me a lot. Because of his height, the ball didn’t have to be that short for him to cut you. He brought back the back cut. He just tapped it on the head rather than hit it hard. I tried to cramp him up, but I didn’t have the pace. He was so quick on his feet, my margin for error was small. He gave himself room to hit through the off-side, even when we’d packed the field. That made me question what I was doing, and when he’s got me at that point he’s won half the battle.’
Casson was one of an increasing band of frustrated first-class and Test bowlers. Soon they included the touring Sri Lankans, against whom Hughes made 49 for a Cricket Australia Chairman’s XI in Adelaide, before being stumped off the world record holder Muttiah Muralitharan.
The match that announced his readiness for first-class cricket came a few days later, against a Victorian Second XI attack that included past and future Australian representatives Mick Lewis, Clint McKay and Michael Beer. Aaron Finch, who had remained close with Phillip since the Centre of Excellence, was telling his teammates in the Victorian Second XI, ‘Watch out, this kid’s a genius.’ On a soft, difficult wicket at Hurstville Oval in Sydney’s south, Hughes stood vigil for 51 in more than three hours in the first innings – seventh man out in a total of 182 – before hitting a more aggressive 137 in the second. The Victorians were more than a match for Steve Smith, who made a pair down the order. ‘They didn’t believe me after the first innings,’ Finch says, ‘but they did after the second.’
‘It was an interesting game,’ says Rohrer, who was seeing Hughes bat at length for the first time.
Right-arm Victorian quick Cameron Huckett was no-balled out of the game in his first over for bowling two beamers at Hughes. That was an accident, but the frustration from the experienced Victorians was intriguing.
‘The funniest part was watching opposition teams trying to counter his cutting,’ Rohrer says. ‘They’d put in a couple of points and a gully and he found his way through there. They’d drop men back and he’d get it past them to the fence. He rarely hit the point fielder. He had an uncanny knack of knowing where they were and where they weren’t. He had something subconsciously where he just knew. That’s the difference between the great players and the rest of us – they know things without needing to think. He knew his game from an early age, a thing you don’t usually see until players are in their late twenties.’
Steve O’Keefe saw him bat and thought, ‘He’s ready to go. I hadn’t seen anything like that.’
Those two innings, Daniel Smith recalls, were ‘the first time people sat up and thought this kid could play. To be a young punk against a team whose bowlers played for Australia, and Second XI cricket at that time was very strong, showed he was a first-class player.’
The NSW Sheffield Shield side had a new coach looking for new talent. Matthew Mott, a former Victorian and Queensland Shield batsman, had been assistant for two years to Trevor Bayliss, who in 2007 accepted an offer to coach Sri Lanka. Seeking information on Phillip Hughes, Mott spoke to Daniel Smith, whom he rated a very good judge of a cricketer.
Mott asked, ‘What do you know about this kid?’
‘He knows how to score runs,’ Smith said. ‘He might not look orthodox, but he knows how.’
‘What about the next level?’
‘If Second XI runs mean anything, he’ll be right.’
The state team had already played three Sheffield Shield games. With Phil Jaques opening the batting in the Australian Test team, NSW had been using Grant Lambert, the Fairfield all-rounder, as a makeshift top-order partner for Cowan.
Phillip knew, through Daniel Smith, that he was in the running. His main rival, as he saw it, was his old sparring partner, Usman Khawaja. Who would the state choose?
The complicating factor for Khawaja was that he was finishing a tertiary degree in aviation and had his end-of-year exams coming up. Hughes knew that Khawaja sometimes took time off from cricket to study.
He called Khawaja and said quietly, ‘Are you playing this week?’
Khawaja said no: he had exams.
The path was clear. Education had come to Phillip’s rescue.
‘From there,’ says Daniel Smith, ‘it went a million miles an hour for him.’
