The night Phillip Hughes was selected for NSW, he celebrated in the Palace Hotel with Matt Day and the locals who had adopted him as their favourite son.
HE RECEIVED A TEXT message from Simon Katich, the Test batsman who had been brought to Sydney from Western Australia and installed as state captain when he did not make the Australian team.
‘Congratulations mate, looking forward to it, can’t wait to play with you.’
Meanwhile, Neil D’Costa, while thrilled for Phillip and his family, harboured some quiet doubts about the upcoming Shield match. Was Phillip ready? He was still a month from his nineteenth birthday and had struggled for runs until the end of the previous first-grade season. His Centre of Excellence winter stint had done him good, but the step up to Sheffield Shield cricket, intense competition with the best adult players in the country, had undone more talented young cricketers than could be counted.
‘I didn’t think he was ready when he was eighteen,’ D’Costa admits. ‘I thought he might go well at the start but then they’d work him out and he’d be stuck.’
For Phillip, D’Costa had stepped into the gap left by not living with Greg. Like a father, the coach was nervous when he went to the SCG on 20 November 2007.
Greg, Virginia and Megan Hughes drove down from Macksville, Megan taking some days off school, and Jason was at the game too.
‘We drove down all the time, with Mum and Dad in the front and me in the back,’ Megan says. ‘I loved that atmosphere when he played state cricket. He was so happy being in that NSW team . . . We were all so proud of him. The whole family shared his joy.’
Katich won the toss and decided to bat, which meant Phillip would be in the game immediately, opening with Cowan against Tasmania’s Ben Hilfenhaus and Brett Geeves, both future Australian representatives. In the SCG home changing room, coach Matthew Mott was confident in Phillip.
‘It’s funny, my first impression had been how small he was. From what people had said about his batting, I’d had this picture of a big, strong, power hitter, but he looked like a little left-handed battler. But in the way he prepared, he showed this steely resolve and he just wanted to score runs.’
Another, smaller thing impressed Mott upon their first meeting. ‘He had great manners. He looked you in the eye, shook your hand firmly.’
Katich had only seen Phillip play once, in a recent club match, in which Randwick–Petersham’s right-arm paceman Burt Cockley had troubled him with awkward short-pitched bowling into his ribs. But when Phillip came into the Sheffield Shield group, Katich says, ‘He was a happy-go-lucky young bloke. You can see young guys that get really overwhelmed with coming up to that level and it is all about how they perform, but that was never an issue with him.’
Phillip’s shy cheerfulness was needed during the baggy blue cap presentation, made by former NSW Test opener John Dyson beside the SCG nets. Throughout a stirring speech about what it meant to play for NSW, Dyson was steadily looking Ed Cowan in the eye. Finally, Dyson stepped forward to present the cap – to Cowan, who said, ‘Actually, it’s this bloke’. Phillip, who had been hiding behind someone taller, emerged, amid great laughter, with a bashful grin to accept his cap.
Phillip and his mum. Greg and Virginia were often in the SCG Members Pavillion for Phillip’s first season as a NSW Blue.
This was the SCG, the home ground of Trumper and Bradman, Simpson and Walters, the Waugh brothers and Clarke; the Test arena where Neil Harvey, Greg Chappell and Ricky Ponting had produced their very best for Australia. For the 18-year-old Phillip Hughes, it was simply a place to go out and do his business. He felt at home. When he arrived at the wicket he greeted a familiar face: Darren Goodger, a north-coast umpire who was also making his Sheffield Shield debut. Goodger had umpired Phillip through the ranks and says, ‘He always knew you, always. He had an unselfconscious ease in recognising all and sundry. That was the country boy in him: it never worried him saying g’day to a fat umpire. He was raised by a gentleman to be a gentleman.’ Goodger remembers it as a special day ‘because people came down to see Phil on debut and got the bonus of seeing me!’
The first overs were uneasy. Phillip faced a maiden from Geeves before Cowan, on two, fell to Hilfenhaus. Phillip was then joined by Peter Forrest, a stylish 22-year-old right-hander from the Hawkesbury club north of Sydney. Forrest was playing his fifth first-class match. He had observed Phillip’s batting in club and Second XI cricket, but felt that ‘he played low-percentage cricket. You felt he couldn’t keep playing like that without nicking off. But everyone was talking about him, they had such big raps on him. I didn’t know whether to enjoy it or to see him as an upstart who might take my spot.’
Cricket is an unusual game, being a series of individual battles within the context of a team sport. It is not unusual for teammates to be competitive with each other and sometimes jealous of each other’s success, fearing what it will mean for themselves. Cricketers must all deal with this cross-purpose in their own way, and Phillip was seeing this as he rose through the ranks. He and Usman Khawaja had always engaged in friendly competitive banter, partially testing themselves against each other even when in the same team.
Forrest, that day in November 2007, fell in love with Phillip as a teammate. ‘I was in really good nick and felt comfortable,’ Forrest says. ‘In that first innings, he played a lot differently from what I’d seen. He let a lot of balls go. Every now and then he’d play an unbelievable cover-drive. He was a solid, typical opening batsman.’
What Forrest soon enjoyed was the bowlers’ inability to work his partner out. ‘They thought he’d get himself out, but they didn’t realise just how strong he was outside off-stump and how he backed himself.’
‘Before long, Forrest was ‘standing at the other end thinking, “You’re too good for this.” He was so strong in the areas where bowlers were told to bowl’.
Phillip and Forrest batted out the first session. From the changing room, Katich saw that the wicket was spinning early and that right-arm off-spinner Jason Krejza, soon to make his Test debut, turning the ball sharply away, had two slips to the left-handed Phillip.
‘He played it like he’d been playing them for five years,’ Katich recalls. ‘There were no nerves, he played proper shots. Hilfy was in a good patch, but Hughesy made him look like a medium-pacer.’
Hilfenhaus was a bowler Phillip admired greatly, and he later told Matt Day that the highlight of his game was making runs against Hilfy. The other opening bowler, Geeves, remembers, ‘He was only 18 and we just assumed we would get him out at some stage. He played incorrect cricket, I guess: anything on the stumps he cut the hell out of, and anything straight he stodged around.’
D’Costa, watching emotionally, saw the innings differently. His reservations about Phillip’s readiness for this level began to fall away, although he knew that greater challenges were yet to come. On this day, however, D’Costa says, ‘He looked sensational. He hadn’t changed anything. We’d been preparing for that day the whole time. He was mentally clear, ready to play.’
At lunch, Phillip came in unbeaten on 34.
‘I think he couldn’t believe where he was at,’ D’Costa says. ‘It had been so easy. He looked like he’d played a hundred first-class games. He’d let go, let go, let go, hit a four – beautiful!’
After the break, Phillip accelerated, moving to 51 and taking the partnership with Forrest to 112. Then Krejza bowled a long-hop and Phillip’s eyes lit up.
‘It was one of those balls he could do anything with,’ says Forrest, ‘and he got it horribly wrong.’
His cut shot slewed to backward point, where Geeves held the catch.
When Phillip came off, he was devastated at getting out when he was set. Coach Mott observed his reaction approvingly. ‘In your first game, your first thought is just not getting a duck,’ Mott says. ‘When he got out for 51, he had this pure disappointment, he was not happy. Some players pretend to be disappointed when they’ve made 50, but he was genuinely upset.’
Forrest went on to 177, a maiden century, Brad Haddin added 100 and Katich declared on the second day at seven for 512. Tasmania struggled to nine for 214 before Phillip enjoyed his first fielding landmark. Beau Casson was bowling to the Tasmanian tail-ender Brendan Drew.
‘I’d like to say it was a lovely delivery,’ Casson says, ‘but it wasn’t. Drew swept it quite hard to deep backward square leg.’
Nobody, including the bowler and the batsman, saw Phillip fielding in the deep. Phillip, always the butt of jokes over his height, emerged from ‘below grass height’, his teammates said, before taking the catch.
‘The boys had a joke that he popped up out of the ground,’ Casson says. ‘He had this ability to wait right till the end and catch the ball just before it hit the ground. It was quite funny. I didn’t know he was out there. Happy days!’
NSW won the match by an innings, and Phillip was hooked on Sheffield Shield cricket. High quality, combative and yet friendly, without the scrutiny of close-up television coverage, in an atmosphere of hard-edged mateship on both sides, it was made for him and he for it.
Mott was right, however; the one person who was not impressed by his first half-century was Phillip himself. He went back to the Activate Cricket Centre and said to his friend Ash Squire, ‘These guys are too good for me. I have to work harder.’
Over the next two months, he made a seamless transition into interstate cricket, bringing the extraordinary run-scoring consistency of his junior years straight into the first-class game. It was incredible, and yet he had promised that he was ready for this. Now everyone believed him.
He played four Sheffield Shield games by mid-January, making half-centuries in all four. He also scored 68 in his one-day domestic debut in the 50-over Ford Ranger Cup against Victoria at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and was selected in invitation teams playing one-dayers against the touring New Zealanders and Sri Lankans, gaining a taste of international adult cricket.
His impact on the NSW Sheffield Shield campaign was immediate. His second match put him squarely into the kiln of hard first-class cricket. NSW batted first, and he was out for a duck. Victoria’s first innings ended with an altercation over a catch taken by Katich off the 34-year-old Victorian fast bowler Shane Harwood. When he came off and changed into his bowling gear, Harwood was steaming.
Matthew Wade, who was keeping wicket for Victoria, remembers: ‘Hughesy had to open the batting against a very angry man, who was a big guy and bowling very well. Harwood hit him in the helmet and the ribs, but then Hughesy started smacking him everywhere. The faster Harwood bowled, the harder he hit him.’
He made another 51, in a partnership of 101 with Greg Mail, to see NSW out of trouble.
The grown men were coming at Phillip Hughes. These weren’t north coast A-graders, but the most hardened professional cricketers in the country. In his third match, against Queensland on a juicy Gabba pitch, Phillip batted in the middle-order after the selectors preferred Phil Jaques and Mail as openers. Coming in at four for 124, he batted with Katich and, for the first time in state cricket, his good mate Daniel Smith.
‘You’d turn around and there was [Jimmy] Maher, [Shane] Watson, [Chris] Hartley, [Michael] Kasprowicz – I was in awe of what these guys had done in the game,’ Smith says. ‘For a young kid from the country to walk out onto a spicy wicket and get 50 or 60, it didn’t surprise me, but he batted like he didn’t have a worry in the world.’
‘He didn’t play reputations or lie down for big egos,’ says Matthew Mott.
Out in the middle, the running commentary from the slips cordon and others in the field was incessant and belittling.
‘The Queenslanders got stuck into him to find out if he had what it takes,’ recalls Smith. ‘He’d just smile and I took it upon myself to stand up for my mate. The little guy always gets picked on. I don’t think it was personal. The Australian way, the NSW way, was to stick up for each other; it’s two against eleven out there.’
At stumps, they had both been dismissed: Phillip for 53 and Smith for 42.
‘He got out before me and I had a crack at him at the end of the day thinking we were going to get big scores,’ Smith says. ‘But I got out not long after him.’
By the end of January, Phillip, flying high, had helped NSW to the top of the Shield ladder. Expecting to hold his place for the remainder of the season, he was resistant when Cricket Australia asked him to join the Australian team for the Under-19 World Cup in Malaysia.
‘He was disappointed at having to miss Shield games and potentially giving his spot to someone else,’ says Day. ‘Also, he’d been captain in his last year of NSW Under-17s and Under-19s, and he was quite disappointed that he wasn’t captain in the Under-19 World Cup.’
The tournament was not a good one for Australia who, despite having players the calibre of Phillip, Steve Smith, Josh Hazlewood, James Faulkner and James Pattinson, failed to make the semifinals. Playing as a batsman-wicketkeeper, Phillip’s highest score in four matches was 46.
Having kept wicket through his junior career, Phillip was less keen to practise now, giving almost all of his skills-training time to batting. Daniel Smith, himself a keeper, says that Phillip ‘had ability, and being three-foot-one always helped. He had nice hands and a good understanding of it. But he didn’t really love it. Cricket was about batting’.
Phillip was back with the rest of the NSW team on his return to the Sheffield Shield, where he resumed his astonishing consistency with 73 and 58 not out against Tasmania in Hobart and 35 against South Australia in Sydney. NSW would host Victoria in the Sheffield Shield final a week later. Even though all of their Test stars were back, including Michael Clarke, Brett Lee, Stuart MacGill and Stuart Clark, Phillip retained his place at the top of the order with Jaques.
The match was a showcase for Katich (86 and 82), Lee (five wickets and a vital second-innings 97), Casson (89 and four wickets to bring the match home), and Victoria’s Peter Siddle, who took five for 66 and four for 101. In a high-quality, tense affair, the star performers were present and future Australian Test players; but only one batsman from either side made a century. Phillip was out for six in the first innings, caught by David Hussey off Siddle, and the match was on an edge, NSW leading by 65, when he started his second innings.
Phillip would start it in pain, having sprained his ankle earlier in the match. ‘It was very tender, and at night he was having physio treatment,’ Greg Hughes recalls. ‘We didn’t know if he’d be able to get back out there, but he was so determined to help the team out.’
Over the next four hours, with Jaques and Katich playing second fiddle, Phillip took the game out of Victoria’s reach. It was a vital moment, Katich recalls. ‘The SCG gets flatter as the match gets on and . . . we had a bit of work to do.’
The Victorians, having dismissed Phillip cheaply on day one, were flummoxed and eventually frustrated. David Hussey remembers that ‘the whole of Australia’s cricketing world was watching and waiting for a big performance from him. We had all these plans in place for him in the second innings, and he just seemed to find a way of getting out of trouble. We thought early on that he didn’t move his feet very well, so we were going to bowl really full and try to get him to drive on the off with the ball shaping away from him to bring the slips into play.
‘That worked ever so well in the first innings, but he raced to about 30 from 15 balls in the second innings and it was, “Oh no, he’s off to a flier”. Then we started the leg-stump line, like the old Bodyline theory with six on the leg side, but he found a way to get the ball really fine. So we put in a really fine fine leg and then he pulled one past square leg with the full face of the bat and we were like, “How are we going to get this guy out now?”’
They turned to spin, through the leg-spinner Bryce McGain, who was bowling well enough to bring himself a Test debut at age 36 a year later.
‘We’d keep hearing about some young kid,’ McGain says, ‘and as you usually do, you just plan to bounce the crap out of him and get him out, but it wasn’t that easy when it came to the Shield final. What struck us was that he was in for the fight, and don’t worry, we gave him absolutely everything. He copped it and we were going hard at him because we wanted to get into the middle order, but he batted really, really well. He was so impressive.
‘Bowling to him was a battle. He played spin with real aggression and wanted to dominate. It was on from the first ball, he was liable just to run down and belt you over your head. He didn’t seem concerned with the consequences of the way he played, he always wanted to be on top. He slog-swept me, but he was pretty patient. He wasn’t just flaying the ball around, which we found out later that he could do. He was pretty patient, did what was required, played to the conditions and put away the bad ball.’
Watching Phillip deal with McGain, Katich was lost in admiration. ‘All lefties have challenges facing spin at the SCG, where you’ve got rough and orthos firing it in there, or a leggie. Bryce is a very good bowler, and he was coming around the wicket into the rough. It was spinning, but Hughesy treated it as another little challenge. He played him beautifully, he wasn’t afraid to go down the wicket and hit it over their head or slog-sweep them, or hit out of the rough through cover, which was one of the hardest shots you can play as a leftie. None of it worried him at all.’
After Phillip hit McGain out of the attack, the Victorians returned to pace and gave him, Hussey says, ‘a bouncer barrage’ as he got close to his century.
‘He cut us for fun into the stands as well. It was a case of us executing our skills poorly or him keeping a step ahead of us and playing better. We tried to get into his head but nothing ever fazed him. Maybe he was like a duck on a pond paddling madly away under water, but on the surface he stayed very calm. With that cheeky grin, he seemed in complete control, which was all the more frustrating as an opposition player.’
Pay television was broadcasting the final, and in his office at Macquarie Bank, Matt Day could see his mate getting close to a century. ‘When he was on 90, I sneaked out of work two hours early to get to the ground.’ He got there just in time.
Phillip’s celebration when he passed 100 is, Katich says, ‘still talked about to this day’.
Jaques says Phillip ‘nearly leapt into orbit. I haven’t seen such passion from anyone on making a hundred in my career. He was so pumped, he loved playing for NSW.’
Katich, who was at the other end, recalls, ‘It was great to be there. He went crazy, and it was fantastic to see that sheer joy and excitement because it was that exciting for him. I don’t think I have seen a celebration as excited as Hughesy’s that day, not in my whole career, and I have seen some pretty good ones.
‘Growing up, I saw Michael Slater at Lord’s and plenty in between, but in terms of excitement and sheer jubilation, probably none better. He ran down the wicket, massive big punch and jumped in the air and just kept running. The boys thought he was going to run into the crowd like Pat Cash at Wimbledon . . . Eventually when he came back we had a big hug.’
Even one Victorian was cheering for him. Wade, who had been dropped as wicketkeeper for Adam Crosthwaite for the final, watched on television. ‘I was supporting Victoria but was really happy he had done what he’d done. Everybody else was seeing what we already knew.’
With Katich, Clarke, Casson and Lee making half-centuries, NSW were able to declare more than 600 runs ahead. The game was safe, though Phillip was not finished. Victoria’s champion batsman, Brad Hodge, came in at number three to face MacGill. He cracked his first ball to mid-wicket, where Phillip was positioned.
‘It was a brilliant catch,’ Katich says. ‘It bounced out of his hands and he spun around and got it on the second grab.’
The post-match celebrations, after Casson spun out the last four wickets, were for the team achievement, but there was a special focus on the teenager who had finished his first Shield season with 559 runs at 62.11.
‘Any time a kid of that age makes a hundred in a Shield final you know he is special,’ Katich says. ‘He was the youngest to do it, I think. Whenever someone does something like that you know natural progression will lead to higher honours. Experience with their raw talent will get them there.’
David Hussey was among the Victorians who visited the NSW rooms, and went about getting to know Phillip a bit better. Hussey was drinking with Katich, telling him, ‘Everyone thinks this kid is going to be a hundred-Test player, and if he keeps playing this way, look out, world.’
Phillip joined them.
‘Congratulations,’ Hussey said, ‘and make sure you never forget how you played and when you do start playing Test cricket remember how you scored these runs.’
Megan Hughes remembers, ‘After the crowd went home, he walked down the SCG steps from the dressing rooms and waved to us and called us over. We always waited for when he was free and we were about to go home, but he said, “Come! Come in!” That was the first time we got to meet his new peers and to soak up that he was really doing this. That was the time I remember thinking, “My brother is going to make something out of this”.’
Casson’s parents were also inside, and he says he will ‘never forget our parents sharing that experience. I remember Phil sitting there with the NSW flag around him and a massive smile on his face. The only ones in our team who hadn’t played for Australia were Phil, me and Dom Thornely, and part of me wanted to have my autograph book out.’
Casson would be playing for Australia within a month, on the Test tour to the West Indies. Phillip would only have to wait another year.
•
JASON HUGHES HAD MOVED permanently to Sydney, registered with the Western Suburbs club and started working for a credit union. He and Phillip moved into another unit in Mortlake, the suburb adjoining Breakfast Point, behind the Palace Hotel, and maintained their little colony with Day, Daniel Smith, Andrews, Gosh Daher (known in rugby league as ‘the Phantom Siren’) and Wests players including Phillips, Ash Squire, Manjot Singh and, when he was not on tour, Michael Clarke.
Phillip had turned his circle of friends into a surrogate family, filling the space left by the absence of his parents. ‘He always wanted to instil “home” wherever he was,’ Squire says. ‘He’d regularly come to stay at my place when I was living with my parents. My dad, Ross, was cooking. Phil loved that. I’d go to bed and he’d sit up late talking with Dad.’
‘He was always calling us,’ Andrews says. ‘It was our little mixed family: we’d take the piss out of each other, just like family members, and always look out for each other.’
Sometimes when he was playing at the SCG, they would go to watch after a flurry of texts. ‘How much is he on?’ ‘He’s going to make a hundred!’
Phillip enjoyed female company as much as any of his mates. Nino Ramunno remembers a surprise twenty-first birthday party for his cousin in late 2009 at Hurricanes, a restaurant in Bondi. Needing to think of a pretext to invite Phillip, Nino tried unsuccessfully for two days. Phillip didn’t want to go. Then Nino said there would be lots of girls.
‘Zoom!’ Nino laughs. ‘He was there straightaway.’
•
IN AUGUST 2008, PHILLIP was off to India for an Australia A tour comprising two first-class and five one-day matches. Having been there twice, he was growing more comfortable in India, but he had a disappointing return of 48 runs in three first-class innings. He did somewhat better in the one-dayers, averaging 50.66 with a highest score of 49 not out. Katich, his captain, says Phillip ‘got knocked over by quicks bringing the ball back in to him, but that was just an experience thing’.
Opponents still took notice of him, however. Among them was Virat Kohli, the young Indian star who had played against Phillip in the Under-15s and Under-19s but first got to know him off the field during the 2008 A tour.
‘Straightaway I found out he was one of those mischievous, chirpy type of lads,’ Kohli says, ‘and he would want to talk to people he admired or liked their game and that is when we had a bit of conversation about the bats and where the bats are made and all that sort of stuff. That was my first proper interaction with him.’
Phillip’s own teammates from other states were getting to know him better as well. David Hussey remembers that Phillip ‘was rooming with Shaun Tait, and he was hanging on to Shaun Tait’s pocket wherever he went. We drank eight coffees a day because it was that boring, but he was very good company. He always had that wicked grin and something funny to say, and he would laugh and laugh.’
No matter what happened on the field, Hussey recalls that Phillip ‘was always very consistent – he would put his bat down and reflect on the innings and then get on with it, just enjoy everyone’s company in the dressing room’.
A day at the races with Jason. The brothers were still incredibly close.
As well as Tait, Phillip roomed with Brett Geeves on the tour. Since Phillip’s Shield performances against Tasmania in his first year, Geeves had the utmost respect for him.
‘To see an 18-year-old come in and dominate the game and to be spoken about in the same way we were talking about Simon Katich in his first year is a remarkable thing,’ Geeves says.
Due to bomb threats, the team spent long days cloistered in their hotels and got to know each other better. Phillip bantered about his Italian background, calling himself a ‘wog’.
‘All those things that have been said about Phil are really true,’ Geeves says. ‘He was a simple, humble country kid and he would not have had an enemy in domestic cricket.’
If Phillip had caused ripples in his first year with NSW, in his second he made crashing waves. Still a teenager, he finished the season third in the Sheffield Shield aggregates and averages with 891 runs at 74.25. Meanwhile, Matthew Hayden struggled with his form and Phil Jaques with a chronic back injury as Australia suffered a home Test series defeat against South Africa, its first since Phillip Hughes was four years old and playing with his Tonka trucks.
On his return from India, Phillip did not immediately build momentum towards the chance of Australian selection. Adapting from the low wickets of Chennai to the early- season WACA proved beyond him, and three failures in Perth were followed by two more in the Ford Ranger Cup against Queensland and South Australia.
Neil D’Costa, having moved to India to head the Vidarbha Cricket Association’s academy program, was not nearby, and Phillip prepared for the Sheffield Shield match in Adelaide under a cloud, having had a moderate Indian tour and then 24 runs in his first five innings in Australia.
South Australia made 313 on the first day, and then, on the seventh ball of the NSW innings, Phillip ran out his partner Greg Mail. He was joined by Peter Forrest.
‘Facing Shaun Tait for the first time, we were pretty nervous,’ Forrest remembers. ‘Or I was. Hughesy might have been.’
They survived the new ball and found their flow, taking the score to 112 by the break. While Forrest was outscoring Phillip, 67 to 43, he says it was Phillip’s quiet maturity that helped him shed his own nerves.
‘He’d give you nothing in your chats between overs. There’s guys who chew your ear off, and you can’t wait to get up the other end. Not him. He didn’t say much, but he had that belief that he was better than anyone he was facing. He had this steel in his eyes, an inner drive. He was so competitive.’
The partnership blossomed after lunch, the pair adding 134 in the afternoon session and both passing their centuries.
‘He was so much fun to bat with,’ Forrest says. The South Australian bowlers ‘saw this tiny kid playing shots, and they got more and more angry and irritated, they didn’t know where to bowl to him’.
Forrest fell that evening for 135, but Phillip batted into the next day until he was caught behind off Mark Cleary for 198. It was ‘a special innings again’, says Daniel Smith. NSW could not force a win in the game, but Phillip had ignited his season.
At a poultry show in Maitland. Phillip never missed an opportunity to drive up from Sydney for family time.
He followed up with first-class half-centuries against Victoria and the touring New Zealanders and some useful runs in the Ford Ranger Cup. Five weeks after his Adelaide innings, he produced one of the greatest batting performances in the Sheffield Shield’s then 116-year history, a match that is still talked about with wonder by those who played in it.
Before the NSW team flew to Hobart to play the strong Tasmanian side, the boxer Shannon Briggs, who was a friend and former rugby league teammate of Phillip’s, phoned his mate Damien Wright, the long-serving Tasmanian opening bowler.
‘Phil Hughes is coming down to play you guys and he’s going to score a hundred for sure,’ Briggs said.
Wright – who would not be playing in the game – responded, ‘Not a chance in hell. We’ll sledge the hell out of him and let him know what it’s all about.’
Among first-class bowlers, this was a common response to the sight of a teenage opening batsman.
On the trip down, as usual Daniel Smith made an advance phone call to the team hotel.
‘We’d become really close by then,’ says Smith, ‘and were always roommates. We rang the hotel, and if they didn’t have us together we’d change the rooms. We got there and went to our room. The night before that game, he said, “I’m on tomorrow, I’m going to score some runs”. I’d have loved to be a betting man, because when he said that, he almost always did.’
Throughout his career, Phillip had this uncanny knack of forecasting a big score.
Ash Squire recalls: ‘The first time I really knew how good he was, the day before a first-grade game against North Sydney, I fed him balls for a long time and I’d never seen anyone hit the ball so badly. He said, “I’m going to make a hundred tomorrow.” He went out and got 112. He had this amazing mental strength.’
Wary players wandered out to the Bellerive Oval wicket to inspect it or, in this case, to see if they could find it. It was, says Smith, ‘the greenest I’ve ever seen, even more than the Gabba’.
Out the back at East Street for Christmas.
Ed Cowan says it ‘looked like a jungle’. Usman Khawaja, who would be opening with Phillip, says ‘it was so green, it looked like the outfield’. And then the NSW captain, Dom Thornely, deputising for Katich and Haddin, who were in the Australian Test team, lost the toss.
Geeves and Hilfenhaus opened the bowling. By lunch, NSW had lost Khawaja, Forrest, Cowan and Thornely for 75. Phillip was 51 not out.
‘His attack was premeditated,’ says Matthew Mott. ‘The boys had gone and taken a look at the wicket, and [Phillip] thought a ball would come along with his name on it, so his view was, “I’d better get them before they get me. I’m not going to get out nicking off, I’m going to take them on”. He was going to live by his plan.’
Khawaja had settled on a different plan – to try to dig in and survive – but was caught behind off Geeves after an agonising, almost scoreless half-hour. He sat on the sidelines to watch. Forrest joined him a few balls later.
‘We were watching Hughesy and saying, “I don’t know what’s going on here”,’ Khawaja says. ‘They couldn’t stop him and didn’t know how to stop him. He got smashed in the helmet by Geeves, and then he slogged the next ball through mid-wicket for four. I loved his bravado.’
On the edge of the ground, Daniel Smith was ‘a bit worried’ about Phillip. ‘The wicket had a bit of pace in it, and he was just a young kid. But after half an hour I thought, ‘I’ll sit back and enjoy this – and hope I don’t have to go out and bat!’’
It was a wondrous innings, stunning everyone who was watching, no matter what their vantage point.
Cowan, who laboured at the other end for 47 minutes before being caught behind off Gerard Denton, recalls, ‘He was hitting balls from the top of middle and off stump with power for four. They didn’t know where to bowl to him because he had a knack of hitting balls that others would think of as good bowling for four, backward of point, consistently smacking them off the middle of the bat. These were balls I would leave, but he thought that most of the balls go here and he could hit a fair number of them for four. They’d have two slips and two fly slips and he kept finding the gap. He put pressure on bowlers to do something differently. And he wasn’t just an off-side player. I thought he had a great leg-side game. He had a good pull shot for when they bowled it up in his ribs.’
Steve Smith and Moisés Henriques came and went, and Phillip was the seventh man out, for 93, when Geeves trapped him lbw. The score was 163 and the next three wickets fell for nine.
By lunch on the second day, Tasmania were all out for 127 in the 47th over. Aside from Denton’s 48 at number nine, the next highest score was 25. After lunch, NSW resumed, and so did the pattern of the match, with the bowlers bossing everyone but Phillip.
In the second innings, Khawaja made 0, Forrest 3 and Cowan 1. When Thornely was fourth man out for 0, NSW had 51 runs on the board and Phillip had scored all but four of them.
‘He dominated from ball one,’ Daniel Smith says. ‘Brett Geeves was bowling quick. Geevesy had been around for a while and was getting all the assistance from the wicket, and a little kid is doing this to you, you’re frustrated. Phil just smirked and smiled and kept swatting him to the boundary. People say Phil couldn’t play the short ball, but he dominated. Unorthodox pulls, down-on-one-knee sweep-pulls. Those two innings showed us that this kid had what it took on all surfaces all around the world.’
Steve Smith helped Phillip to a century partnership. His second innings was even more remarkable than his first.
‘It was an incredible day,’ Cowan says. ‘It wasn’t just that he got them, he got them at a clip. Everyone was playing forward defences and nicking them. He’d have seen five slips and two gullies and thought, “Bugger it, I’ll go for them”. Conditions were irrelevant to him.’
On the Tasmanian side, there was shock, frustration, anger – and not a little admiration. Phillip’s former Australian Under-15 teammate Brady Jones, who lived in Tasmania, was watching him play first-class cricket for the first time.
‘In the change rooms during breaks, Geevesy was saying, “We’re bowling a good length and he is putting his front foot to square leg and hitting us behind point”. Half of me wanted to see him knocked over, but I enjoyed that day, he was too good.’
Geeves’s frustration boiled over, and when he brought his roomie banter from India to the middle of Bellerive, Phillip responded with his bat.
‘There were guys we came up against in domestic cricket that were just too good for us,’ Geeves says. ‘When you had the ball in the hand you knew you weren’t going to get them out. Simon Katich, Matthew Elliott and Phil Hughes were [my] three guys . . . We just never looked like getting him out. Hilf is a very competitive bloke and a great bowler but we were at a loss, at an absolute loss as to how to go about bowling to him. He was just too good for us.
‘That day, the wicket was green so we thought we’d get one in the right spot and it would nibble and he would inevitably nick one. But he scored all those runs and he was outstanding. In the second innings we went really hard at him – we were quite aggressive verbally, and in terms of our lines and lengths. Before we knew, we had both gone for 30-odd. We felt like we were in the game the whole time because he was getting it through the gaps and over fielders and at no stage did I think the score was racing to where it was, and we looked up after ten overs and they were 70. It was, “How did this happen?”
‘He was unbelievable. Our plan was to target his body and he just found a way of cutting everything: balls that were at him on the leg stump he had the time to create room with three gullies and four slips, or he would get it over the top and you would put the man back in the hope he would spoon one and he would get it squarer. It was like catching practice into the zones where there were no fielders! It was almost like he was mocking what we were trying to do.’
Meanwhile, Damien Wright was on the phone to a gleeful Shannon Briggs.
‘He’s the real deal,’ Wright conceded. ‘The more they sledged him, the better he got.’
Phillip later said to his cousin Nino Ramunno, ‘Some of the things they were calling me! I had to look down or away because I didn’t want to laugh.’ Instead, he scored 108.
Phillip’s contribution in his two innings, 201 runs out of his team’s 345, broke a record set by Don Bradman. Chasing 221 to win, Tasmania lost five wickets for 90 but the wicket was settling by the third day, enabling Dan Marsh and Tim Paine to secure a three-wicket win. George Bailey, who scored five and eight for Tasmania, says ‘the wicket was hideous . . . After that game the Tasmanian batsmen spoke as a group about changing our mindsets on that wicket. Hughesy had proved scoring runs on it was achievable if you committed to a plan.’
As a story about Phillip’s chutzpah and skill, the game was instantly entering the realm of myth. At the end of the match, Geeves and Daniel Smith sat down for a beer.
Geeves admitted, ‘I had no answers. Didn’t matter what I did. Round the wicket, over the wicket . . . He was too good.’
Ben Rohrer, NSW Sheffield Shield player 706 to Phillip’s 707, was chosen for the one-day match to follow and arrived on the last day of the first-class match. He found his teammates abuzz, saying Phillip was ‘playing a different game to everyone else. Grant Lambert [who scored two and one] loved Hughesy and still tells me about that game all the time.’
Rohrer was instrumental in Phillip’s next century, which came in his next Sheffield Shield game two weeks later. Batting first against South Australia at the SCG, Phillip and Greg Mail endured a torturous half-hour before Phillip again ran his senior partner out.
‘I don’t know if he was a good runner between wickets to start with,’ Cowan says. ‘He ran Maily out a few times. Phil was in the Michael Slater mould – “If it comes out of the middle, I deserve a run”. To be fair, it takes time to get used to the standard of fielding in first-class cricket. Coming from where he came from, it took him a while to realise that not every good shot produces runs.’
Phillip began to find his rhythm, but Forrest missed out and Rohrer joined him at two for 46. Although he had made his debut before Phillip, Rohrer had not played much with him until then.
‘I’d heard a lot of the stories before he came to Sydney. You often hear about a country boy who’s going to be a superstar, and they were right about him. He played at this level and looked like that’s all he should have been playing.’
Off-field, Rohrer had felt the instant bond with Phillip that so many others did. ‘From when he was in the squad, he made you feel like what you had to say was the most important thing to him at that time. He was really curious about what you did outside cricket and where you came from. We’d chat about that sort of stuff. He’d talk about the farm and the cows. I don’t know which was a bigger passion, that or batting.’
When Rohrer joined him in the middle in the South Australia game, he was nervous, but the little teenager reassured him from the first ball.
‘He was so laidback and relaxed out there, you’d have friendly chats in the middle. He knew where he was going to score and where he was going to be targeted. He picked that up as quick as anyone I’ve seen, with the exception maybe of Steve Smith.’
The left-handers put on 50 in a brisk eight overs before lunch, and then another 120 before Phillip was out for 114. Rohrer notched his maiden first-class century, out soon after Phillip.
‘It was a great experience to look back on,’ Rohrer says. ‘I played a lot through point as well, and learnt a lot from him in terms of selectiveness in shot-making. He knew which lengths and lines he could cut, and which ones he couldn’t go near. He helped me drill where my off-stump was and knowing which ones to hit, which was amazing in that he was eight years younger and I was learning off him. That’s how good he was.’
It was a matter of time before the National Selection Panel, chaired by South Australian former Test opener Andrew Hilditch, verified what was being said in Sheffield Shield cricket. Phillip had emerged like no teenage batting talent since Ponting. He might not have the textbook technique but he was making runs in all conditions, against elite bowlers, at a time when Australia was growing desperate for its next generation of top-order batsmen.
Nothing seemed beyond Phillip that summer. The Sheffield Shield went into recess after Christmas to allow a window for the then state-based Twenty20 Big Bash League. Phillip was successful straightaway in the abbreviated format, topping the aggregates and averages for NSW, his highlights an 88-run opening stand in eight overs with David Warner in Adelaide and an unbeaten 80 off 60 balls to chase down 162 runs at the Gabba. ‘I sat back and let him have the strike,’ Warner recalls. ‘They bowled well to both of us, but to him they were feeding the cut shot. We saw a different side to Hughesy, how he could play the short-form game.’
By then, Mott was observing, ‘He scored a lot of tough runs. If we had tricky chases, he’d play an uncompromising cover-drive from the first ball of the innings and it settled everyone down.’
By the time the Shield resumed, Phillip was in the Australian selectors’ sights for the upcoming South African tour. Hayden had announced his retirement, and the mooted candidates to partner Katich in the Test series were Phillip and his state teammate Jaques. One of the unluckier Australian cricketers in that period, the left-hander nicknamed ‘Pro’ had scored three centuries in his 11 Test matches between 2005 and 2008, averaging 47.47. He would have been locked in for a prosperous international career but for an ongoing back injury that often left him unable to run, let alone bat.
The late-January Shield match between NSW and Tasmania at Newcastle No 1 Sports Ground was billed as a ‘bat-off’ between Phillip and Jaques. The national media had converged on Phillip for the first time, and he was lapping up the attention. He drove with Forrest from Sydney to Newcastle, and Forrest recalls that the media build-up made it ‘like a showdown’.
Two nights before the match, Phillip was to stay with his father, who had driven to Newcastle from Macksville.
An excited Phillip said to Greg, ‘Have you seen the papers? Ponting says they’re going to go with experience in South Africa. I’m going to show the bastards!’
Jaques was also competitive, in his measured way, but was under extreme duress. ‘My back was no good, so I spent a lot of time on the floor of the change room trying to get it right. To be honest, I had rushed back because I could see a really good young player who was going to be there for a long time, and I wanted to make it as hard for him as possible. That’s part of being a competitor.’
The next morning Katich, back from Test duty, won the toss and decided to bat. In cricket’s dual individual–team nature, Jaques and Phillip, in a contest for the Australian opening spot, went out to face the new ball together.
Ten years Phillip’s senior, despite knowing what was at stake, Jaques could not help liking his confident young partner/rival.
‘All the guys were excited about him coming into the team at first, and when he came in, the thing I was most impressed with is that there was no ego to him, no arrogance, just a country kid who enjoyed his cricket and loved making hundreds,’ Jaques says. ‘He was very respectful of the older guys in the squad and was really eager to learn and improve his game and get to where he wanted to go. He was very focused on playing for Australia and he had that aura of self-belief about him, but without arrogance, and that was refreshing for the older players.’
A proud-as-punch Hughes family at the Steve Waugh Medal with Phillip’s Rising Star Award.
Whatever eventuated with the so-called ‘bat-off’, the first thing to ensure was that they did not run each other out.
‘As long as we didn’t have to run between wickets we were fine,’ Jaques jokes. ‘We got out a few times over the years that way, he got me a few times and I got him a few times. As long as we were hitting to the boundary, we were fine.’
The wicket was good, and Jaques’s attitude on the day was generous, almost paternal. ‘I always talked a lot in the middle, particularly batting with the younger guys, but he was very self-assured, he knew what he was trying to do and it was just a matter of keeping him focused and not getting too excited. He always had a really good plan on how he was going to play and didn’t need too much advice. I gave it out a bit, and he would nod respectfully and get on with his work.’
Geeves and Denton opened the bowling. As they chatted between overs, Jaques told Phillip to get over the top of his cut shots ‘and hit them to the boundary every time they give us a bit of width’.
The contest was a non-event. Jaques and Phillip got a flying start, clubbing 23 off the first 23 balls before Jaques was bowled by Denton. Phillip, in partnerships of 116 with Forrest and 104 with Katich, made his way to a well-paced 151, surely the innings of a Test opening batsman.
‘It was chalk and cheese,’ says Katich, who scored 143 while Thornely made 110, setting up a big NSW win.
Phillip, having made his point in the first innings, flayed a celebratory 82 in the second. Jaques scored 12. ‘Hughesy was in prime form and Jaquesy couldn’t move,’ Katich says. ‘Hughesy was playing a different game. He just smoked them. He kept cutting the hell out of Krejza and they ended up having three or four points to stop it, so he ended up going the other way – hitting them through deep mid-wicket. He had an amazing eye, which is a huge advantage as a batsman. Throw in technique, and you have a double weapon.’
The Tasmanians were getting a familiar feeling. George Bailey recalls ‘an enormous amount of cut shots. With two points, an extra gully and a deep point, it seemed almost a game to Hughesy to see how tantalising he could make it for the fielders while drawing us closer and closer to despair.’
Geeves was finding Phillip ‘impossible to bowl to. My natural line and length had served me well, and I was coming off my only good summers at that time. I was bowling at my best, and he made me look stupid’.
After NSW’s 114-run win, with Phillip’s selection for the South African tour now a formality, Jaques was proud of his partner. ‘I couldn’t have been happier for him. While it was personally disappointing to miss out, it was great to see your mates there. As long as there’s a blue cap, there was never any trouble. As it turns out, Phil was the better man and got the runs on the board.’
Beau Casson, a quiet student of the game, was twelfth man in Newcastle. He celebrated the team’s success in the usual way, but was also observing Phillip.
‘A lot of people, if they get close to international cricket, it consumes their thoughts,’ Casson says. ‘I was amazed at how he put that aside and did what he did really well. He must have realised he was a chance, but he was the same lad in the changing room and knew his job was to make runs. To do it at his age shows how much belief in his processes he had.’
The only process Phillip had in mind now was how to get down to Sydney and continue the celebrations. He drove home with Forrest, quietly smiling.
‘So,’ Forrest said, ‘is first-class cricket what you thought it would be?’
Phillip continued to offer nothing but a smile.
‘Maybe you’re too good for it?’ Forrest said.
‘But he had this cheeky grin,’ Forrest says, ‘like he knew he was ready for Test cricket.’
Phillip was at home with Jason in Mortlake when a call came at 8.30 pm. He listened quietly, said a few words, then hung up and went outside to the barbecue area.
Jason said, ‘Anything happened?’
‘No, nothing.’ Then, after a pause: ‘I’m going to South Africa!!’
The brothers ‘jumped about and took our shirts off and celebrated and did what two young blokes would do’, Jason says.
In a later interview, Phillip said, ‘I couldn’t stop running around the house, I was just that pumped.’
Up in Macksville, the rest of the family were ‘ecstatic’, Greg says. ‘This was his dream, the culmination of all his hard work. We were so proud.’ Greg flew down to Sydney the next night to join Phillip’s inner circle, who converged at the Palace Hotel.
‘We certainly celebrated,’ says Daniel Smith. ‘Pretty much the whole pub was celebrating on his behalf. Even though he’d only been here a short time he was like a local, because he’d walk in and buy a beer and have a chat with anybody. We got that out of the way and then he was down to business, ready to play.’
Phillip Hughes was in the Australian squad as Simon Katich’s opening partner. Barring the unforeseen, three weeks later in Johannesburg, he would become Australian Test player number 408.
