It was a long way from Macksville, but on the morning of 26 February 2009, a bare 18 days after Phillip Hughes was batting for Australian selection on the Newcastle No 1 Sports Ground, Greg, Virginia, Jason and Megan took their seats in the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg. Virginia had an Australian flag in her lap. She couldn’t see many others in the ground.
THEY WOULD NOT HAVE to wait long to see their boy bat. Ricky Ponting had won the toss for the first Test match and decided to bat. The Wanderers has a small playing surface, known as ‘The Bullring’ for the nearness and height of the grandstands, some of them packed with corporate boxes and seeming to rise vertically above the players. It generates an atmosphere far noisier than its 34,000 capacity.
An hour before the start of play, the Hughes family looked on as Ponting presented new caps to Phillip, Ben Hilfenhaus and Marcus North.
‘I couldn’t tell you one word that [Ponting] said,’ Phillip confessed later. ‘I was that pumped, very nervous but I was just that pumped, and that happy. The cameras were going wild and the guys were coming over shaking my hand, giving me a hug. It was just amazing really, I put it on straightaway and we did the warm-up and I don’t think I’ve ever done a warm-up like it before, I was just running around, it was just crazy.’
The Hughes family watched, also a little crazy with nerves, as the South Africans took the field behind Graeme Smith. They had a bird’s-eye view down the length of the pitch. Then Phillip followed Simon Katich down the long race, sheathed in clear perspex, joining the changing rooms to the field. He had been so nervous he had started to kit up too early and Katich had to settle him in the changing room and tell him, ‘Slow down, enjoy it’.
Phillip said later, ‘I was trying to think to myself, “I’m just going out to play cricket, enjoy it, enjoy it”, but it was that big of a stage and I was very, very nervous.’
When they got near the end of the race, Katich turned and said, ‘Hughesy, you go first’, and let his junior partner run onto the field ahead of him.
Suddenly, the weight of the moment hit Virginia and she grabbed Greg by the arm.
In the story of the Australian Test team that summer, Phillip Hughes was a character entering halfway through. Australia, trying to rebuild on the run after the departures of its nucleus of great players, was in flux. The South Africans had stormed to victory in contrasting Test matches in Perth and Melbourne, bouncing back from a Mitchell Johnson onslaught to stage a record fourth-innings chase at the WACA and then recovering from an impossible position to break Australian hearts in the Boxing Day Test match. But the hosts fought back, again behind Johnson’s speed and hostility, to win in Sydney and leave a sense of unfinished business.
But there are other ways of telling the story, and for the Hughes family and Phillip’s close friends, this was not the halfway point but the beginning. This was when the prodigy of Macksville and NSW was to arrive on the world stage and show that he was indeed the boy wonder, the future champion to follow in the footsteps of Clarke, Ponting, Greg Chappell, Doug Walters and the long line of precocious Australian cricketing heroes.
In the Palace Hotel and at the Activate Cricket Centre in Breakfast Point, Phillip’s crew gathered to watch on television. Macksville homes with pay-TV were packed out. The Star Hotel was putting on free beers for the length of Phillip’s first innings. On his lounge in Brisbane, his mate Peter Forrest was feeling the nerves, as were teammates and cricket friends throughout Australia.
Within the Australian team, the snowball of Phillip Hughes’s gift for friendship had been gathering new mates.
‘He adapted to whatever way of life, whatever characters he met,’ Katich says. ‘They might have been the complete opposite of him, but he got on well with everyone. I certainly never heard anyone say a bad word about him . . . That’s unusual in a cricket team – there’s always going to be differences in personalities and opinions, some guys are closer with others, but there aren’t too many who are universally loved like he was.’
Katich had, in the changing room after the Sydney Test match a month earlier, had a notorious stoush with Clarke. Typically, Phillip was good mates with both of them.
Before leaving home, the Australian squad had staged a short camp in Brisbane, which served as a getting-to-know-you session between the established players and the debutants Phillip, Hilfenhaus, McGain and North.
Mike Hussey, three years into his Test career but now vaulted into senior-batsman ranks by the retirements of Hayden, Langer, Martyn and Gilchrist, had never met Phillip, but he was close to Katich, who had been best man at his wedding.
‘Kato had been saying to me for a while, we’ve got someone really special here,’ Hussey recalls. ‘When Kato says that, you listen. The thing that struck me about Hughesy was that he was a very respectful person from the start. He wasn’t cocky, just quiet and respectful of the older guys. There was something different about him. None of the overconfidence and brashness of some of the younger guys.’
Having suffered from the old-style hazing of junior players by their elders in his early years, Hussey was intent on doing things differently, seeking out Phillip for conversations about his background and his family.
‘I knew what it felt like and the emotions he was going through, so my one-on-one talks were just along the lines of, “Play your way, stick to your game, you don’t want to change”.’
When Hussey had made his Test debut in 2005, Shane Warne had said those words to him, and he never forgot.
McGain, though 16 years older than Phillip, enjoyed the camaraderie as debutants who were equally wide-eyed despite the age difference. McGain missed the flight to South Africa, and once he arrived Phillip kept saying cheekily, ‘Make sure you set your alarm’ at the end of every day.
The first tour fixture, six days before the Johannesburg Test match, was at Senwes Park in the town of Potchefstroom, a university town some 1350 metres above sea level. As the team warmed up, some were struggling for breath in the thin air.
McGain was stretching when Phillip came to him and said, ‘You a bit cooked, old man?’
McGain said, ‘I think we all are, mate.’
Phillip was quiet for a few seconds before saying, ‘You know what? You’re old enough to be my dad.’
He punched McGain on the arm and broke into laughter.
‘He was always laughing,’ McGain says. ‘I guess it was his country upbringing. He didn’t care who you were or how old you were, everyone was a mate and he was there to have a good time and make the most of it. He was certainly doing that on that trip.’
Phillip tuned up for the Test match with 24 and 53 (retired). Katich said to him, ‘You’re in’, not that there was any real doubt.
But there remained the critical matter of where he would field. Being in the firing line and under the helmet at short leg is, traditionally, the lowest rung on the ladder and the place where a debutant batsman is sent to field.
As Australia prepared to bowl in the Potchefstroom game, Katich picked up the short-leg pads and said to Ponting, ‘You want me to hand these over to Hughesy?’
Katich then joked that Phillip, at his height, was ‘built for short leg and won’t even have to squat’.
Ponting, however, had adopted Phillip as his ‘personal project’. He says now, ‘I saw a lot of myself at the same age in Hughesy. He wanted to soak everything up and learn.’
The captain fixed Katich with emotionless dark eyes. ‘No, champ, you’re still doing it.’
Katich couldn’t believe it. Meanwhile Phillip was sitting next to Ponting, cackling to himself.
‘Only he could get away with that,’ Katich says now. ‘If it had been anyone else I might have got the fire going, but because I was so close to him I let the cheeky little bugger get away with it.’
Phillip had got away with it at NSW as well, slipping into second slip without paying his dues at short leg. State teammates joke that he deliberately fumbled and bumbled at short leg so he could get moved out, but nobody can remember him asking permission to move; he simply materialised in the slips cordon one day.
Katich wasn’t buying that in the Australian team, but he accepted Phillip’s craftiness in avoiding the dreaded position. ‘You had to congratulate him on being a smart player.’
But Katich had a surprise in store. As they readied for the big day at the Wanderers, he said to Phillip, ‘Well, if I’m fielding short leg, the least you can do for me, youngster, is face the first ball.’
That ball would be delivered by Dale Steyn, then a 25-year-old small-town boy but who had swiftly won a place among the world’s fastest and most feared bowlers. Steyn was no giant, but his athletic, smooth action generated great pace and swing, and he bristled with hostile intent. In an interview before the Test match, Steyn was asked how he was going to deal with Phillip.
‘We don’t need to put pressure on him,’ Steyn said with his irrepressible smirk. ‘I think trying to replace Matthew Hayden and fill those massive shoes will place enough weight on his shoulders.’
Virginia Hughes waved her Australian flag. She had eyes only for Phillip, who took his guard and scratched out his mark. His studs dug into soft, dark, wet earth. He exchanged nods with Katich, who had often told him, ‘There’ll be two wogs opening for Australia soon.’ And now there were.
As Steyn ran in, with his clean, fluid 400-metre runner’s stride, Phillip tapped his bat in his characteristic gentle manner and raised it from his cocked wrists. The first ball was a good one, pitched just outside off-stump and nipping away, and Phillip confidently left it. Back in Brisbane, Peter Forrest thought, ‘Phew, he’s got through that one!’ A nation of cricket followers was holding its breath.
To the second ball, Phillip gained the reassuring feel of wood on leather, fending to midwicket. The third he left, and the fourth was in his zone, short and wide of off-stump, meat and drink since he was ten years old. He went for a high cut shot, his feet leaving the turf with the thrust of his bat. This was the first-ever Test match in which a video referral system was used, but there was no doubt about this one: the sound of the nick carried clearly around the ground.
Greg and Virginia sat stock still. The Palace Hotel groaned. In Macksville, the Star Hotel had saved a lot of free beer. In Brisbane, Peter Forrest thought, ‘Well, that didn’t look very good!’ Neil D’Costa, Ash Squire and Lloyd Andrews, watching at the Activate Cricket Centre, sat in silence.
‘He was such a kid,’ Squire says. ‘We were shitting ourselves just watching from here, and he was facing it! There was no hiding for a very young man.’
When he eventually returned to Sydney, Phillip would give his batting gloves from that day to Squire, telling them they had been ‘bad luck’.
Daniel Smith was shattered. ‘This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I thought, “It’s gone”, straightaway. You could say, “Jeez that’s a terrible shot”, but that’s the way he played. It was in his zone. He just didn’t execute it. That’s if you knew him. But what were other people going to think?’
Phillip left the field, removed his gear and sat alone in the changing room for a few minutes. He took a shower and went onto the balcony to join his teammates.
‘I just knew it’s not going to be my only duck,’ he said later. ‘It’s going to happen again. I’d like it not to, but that’s just a part of cricket.’
Watching the play, Phillip sat next to McGain. Both were feeling tense, for different reasons: Phillip over his dismissal, McGain over the prospect of a collapse and having to go out and bat against Steyn. Periodically, the television screen in the players’ area recapped the dismissals, and Phillip had to suffer seeing his, over and over.
He finally blurted out, ‘why do they keep showing that?’ Then he turned to McGain and said, ‘Oh well, what’s the worst thing that could happen in your first Test innings? You could jump a metre in the air and try and hit a cut shot over slips for six and get out for a duck. I’ve got that out of the way now, I can get on with it.’
McGain felt that that summed him up: even at this level, he took his medicine and moved on. By day’s end, Australia were five for 254, having fought back from the early loss of Phillip, Katich and Hussey through solid contributions from Ponting, Clarke, Haddin and North.
After stumps, Daniel Smith texted Phillip with commiserations. Phillip texted back, ‘It’s fine, that’s the way it goes, that’s Test cricket.’
The Hughes family’s view of the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg for Phillip’s first Test. A second-innings 75 fortified Phillip’s self-belief.
Smith laughs at the recollection.
‘I thought, “How would you know? You’ve only been there five minutes!” But you could tell that he was happy to be there and he knew he’d have another chance.’
That evening, Phillip caught up with his family, who found him in an upbeat mood. ‘He got as disappointed as anyone, but he was able to pick himself up again really quickly,’ Greg says. ‘He was saying, “That’s cricket, there’s another innings, I’m going to contribute. The game’s still in progress.”’
North’s century on debut and a spanking unbeaten 96 from Johnson gave Australia a first innings of 466 and an eventual lead of 246. Towards the end of South Africa’s first innings, an incident occurred that some teammates would remember for years.
On the first evening, Steyn did a television interview on the Wanderers outfield. Asked about Phillip’s dismissal, Steyn chuckled that his only regret was to have got him out fourth ball; he would have preferred to keep Phillip batting for longer, so he could hit him on the body a few times.
Unbeknown to Steyn, Peter Siddle was walking past, listening in. Siddle was boiling, but kept it to himself, and no other teammates saw the interview. By the third day, when Steyn walked out to bat at eight for 156, Siddle was ready for him. He bowled two fierce bouncers in Steyn’s four balls before lunch. On the resumption, Siddle tore in and bowled the fastest series of bouncers to Steyn that anyone had seen Siddle bowl. Between deliveries, he stood on the wicket and screamed, ‘You want to hit my mate? I’ll hit you!’
Hussey, watching from gully, thought, ‘Wow, this Phil Hughes must be a great guy, everyone’s sticking up for him like this!’
Hussey says he and the team were ‘pumped’ to see Siddle taking the personal risk of attacking Steyn on the youngster’s behalf.
Thanks to century-maker AB de Villiers, South Africa added 64 runs for their last two wickets. Ponting, who had played in Calcutta in 2001 when Australia had enforced the follow-on only to be trounced by India, decided to bat a second time, which gave Phillip the chance to clear his first innings out of his system. He took the first ball again, from Steyn, and in the next over Makhaya Ntini bowled him a short steepler outside his off stump, not unlike the ball that had got him out two days earlier. This time he slapped it behind backward point to the boundary: a cut shot for four, his first runs as a Test cricketer.
As thunderclouds massed around the Wanderers, Phillip cracked seven boundaries through the off-side, five of them off the back foot. Greg recalls the tension. ‘The match was evenly poised, and it was very dark.’ The South Africans snarled, ‘You’re no Matthew Hayden’, but Phillip responded with a grin. He survived an appeal for a leg-side catch off Morne Morkel on 21 – had the South Africans called for the video, it might have shown a touch to the glove – and the loss of Katich to be unbeaten on 36 when the storms closed in. The next morning, he played in a more settled fashion. The South Africans kept pouring in with short bowling and verbal abuse, but, Phillip said, ‘I like to smile at them’.
Seeing Ponting, Hussey and Clarke depart in the space of four balls and North an over later, Phillip compiled a mature 75 before falling to a stunning de Villiers catch at leg-slip.
Katich is full of admiration for that innings. ‘There was so much talk in the media about the way he got out in the first innings, but for a young guy to put that aside and come back, that was his huge mental strength, to overcome being on a pair and trust his game.’
Beau Casson, watching in Sydney, says, ‘He understood himself better than anyone his age. You’d have thought he was a 35-year-old veteran of 150 Test matches.’
At the Wanderers, Greg Hughes rated the innings ‘as good as any cricket I’d seen him play. It was under lights, with South Africa coming at him, with Ponting at the other end. It showed how gutsy he was and how he belonged in Test cricket.’
Johnson and Siddle ensured a 162-run Australian win, and Phillip got to sing the team song led by Hussey and to share the joy with his family. His second-innings 75 fortified his self-belief for the second Test match in Durban starting four days later. He belonged.
After being invited into the dressing room to celebrate, Greg and the family flew home, Phillip’s quiet reassurance still in their ears. Even more than the Wanderers, the Kingsmead pitch at coastal Durban had a name for assisting fast bowlers. The ‘Green Mamba’, as it was called, was supposed to grow damp and dangerous as the tide rose from the Indian Ocean, a short flat walk away. For the second Test match, hot-spot technology was added to the video umpire’s arsenal, the players were wearing black armbands to honour those who had died in the recent terrorist attack on Sri Lankan and Pakistani cricketers in Lahore, but two things never changed: the Durban humidity was extreme, and Ponting, upon winning the toss, looked at the grassy damp wicket and said to Graeme Smith, ‘We’ll have a bat.’
The pitch was not even flat: it had a ridge running through it. Through the combined first innings of both sides, 14 players would be dismissed for single-figure scores, six of them for ducks, and the South African captain would retire hurt for two. Amid this carnage, the ‘two wogs’ were an anomaly.
Katich felt that he had bonded well with Phillip at NSW, though they had not opened the batting together. ‘A lot of the time, once we were both out, he would be sitting beside me and we would chat and watch the other boys bat,’ Katich says. ‘Obviously he was a farm boy and I consider myself a farm boy, growing up on 12 acres. We had that little bit in common, growing up around animals. I would always ask him about his bulls and cows and things like that. Everyone knew he loved them – it was one thing you could always talk to him about, it was something that he was more passionate about than other things you would expect young blokes to be passionate about at that time of life.
‘The other thing that stood out for me was his work ethic. That doesn’t surprise me, growing up where he did and helping his dad . . . The boys loved him, the whole group loved him. He was funny, and he was consistent. Normally you did sense when somebody got down, but if he got down he hid it well, because I never saw it.’
Together, they put together a remarkable first session against Steyn, Ntini, Morkel and left-arm spinner Paul Harris. Katich proceeded steadily to 36, while Phillip hit an extraordinary 14 fours before lunch. This time, the South Africans were not feeding his cut shot. They adapted, bowling fuller and on his pads, and most of his boundaries were clips through the on-side.
Phillip was ‘really laidback’ to bat with, Katich recalls. ‘We didn’t really say too much at mid-pitch, just ‘How ya going?’ He was pretty cruisey, he didn’t get too fussed if the ball was doing a bit or whatever. Having a joke helps with a top-order batsman. You can get too intense and worried about what it’s doing and you get tentative, but that’s the beauty of youth too: they don’t have that bank of experience that holds you back a little bit.’
Australia’s 0/119 at lunch was just the entrée. An over after the resumption, Phillip survived an lbw video referral, but he had edged his sweep off Harris into his pad. The poor referral was a clear sign of Smith’s desperation to get him out. Phillip began to target Harris, skipping down the wicket and trusting himself to hit across the line. Nine overs after lunch, he was on 89, with Katich 51.
Harris was bowling without the assistance of any rough. Phillip thought, ‘I’m going him.’
Ball one, he got underneath a full-length delivery and scooped it over long-on for a one-bounce four. Balls two, three and four he blocked. By ball five, Phillip thought, ‘Why bother blocking? If the ball’s there, I’m going to go for it.’
He jumped out to a flighted fifth ball and hoisted it over the long-on rope to go to 99. If that took guts, he was not going to wait another over to see if the mood would return. Harris gave ball six some air. Phillip took a step and a half forward, then crouched into a sweeping position and threw his bat at the ball. He connected perfectly, launching it onto the grass bank wide of mid-on.
‘After the first six, they brought the guy up from the fence and there were gaps there if I wanted to go,’ Phillip said later. ‘He threw it up so I thought I’ll go again and it just happened. It happened to be my day.’
Fans and friends around the world were letting loose. In Macksville, Phillip’s family, watching on television, had suffered a ‘nerve-racking time’ as he took on Harris in this 90s. Greg says, ‘I was thinking, “Just take your time!” But he had such control of his game.’ In Brisbane, Peter Forrest was ‘jumping in the air celebrating’. In Breakfast Point, Daniel Smith cried for the second and last time watching cricket. Matt Day was on his feet with the locals at the Palace Hotel. In Hobart, Brett Geeves was watching Steyn and Morkel ‘going down the same path as Hilf and me. They thought they would get him next time, but it didn’t work. Dale Steyn has 15 kmh of pace on me and seeing him go down made me feel good about myself as a cricketer, and he is possibly my favourite fast bowler. To watch Phil do that to him was extraordinary.’
The scene was no less jubilant in the Australian changing room at Kingsmead, Ponting and Clarke leading the cheers.
Ponting says, ‘He reminded me of Gilly at his best. His power on the off-side was as good as I had seen from a young cricketer. The more fielders they put in the off-side, the more runs he would score.’ Hughesy had just announced his arrival.
For Clarke, who had known him as the keen little sparrow who had flown into the Western Suburbs club only three years earlier, it was a moment of high emotion. ‘I had seen how good he was and had all the faith in the world that he would be successful,’ Clarke says. ‘I felt so much emotional attachment, I was willing him to success. I was as pumped as if I’d scored a hundred.’
For those who did not know Phillip so well, it felt like a major new discovery that comes along once in a lifetime.
Mike Hussey reflects, ‘I was a bit in disbelief. This guy was playing a different game. He hit balls you wouldn’t expect, from the top of off-stump through point. I thought, “Crikey, that’s a bit of a risk, but well played!” There was a ridge on the pitch, it wasn’t good to bat on. I had a terrible time there, but Hughesy and Kato made it look like they were playing on a road.’
After celebrating, Phillip became, if anything, even more fearless, thrashing Jacques Kallis for boundaries on both sides of the wicket. Kallis was still stunned the next over when Phillip offered him a sharp chance at slip off Morkel, and it went down. Kallis had his revenge soon after, when Phillip cut him to gully and Neil McKenzie was unable to get out of the way, putting his hands in front of his face to take the catch. The scoreboard showed a scarcely believable 115 off 146 balls for Phillip, and it was not even tea yet.
He wasn’t finished with the South African bowlers, but he would have to wait a day or two. Katich went on to a courageous 108, Hussey battled to 50, admitting to Steyn in a heated on-pitch exchange that he was terrified, and the South Africans underscored the dangerousness of the pitch by capitulating for 138, a deficit of 214 runs.
Again Ponting batted a second time, a blessing for Phillip. On an improving wicket, he played an innings of a completely different character, hitting the boundary 15 times over six hours as he resolutely steered Australia to an unbeatable lead. Katich and Ponting both outscored him in their partnerships, but Phillip could not be accused of riding his luck this time. He waited for Ponting to take the lead and, from the stands, Tim Nielsen observed that ‘when Punter hit a ball back over the bowler’s head after they’d been batting for a while, it was like the signal for Hughesy: “We’re getting on top of them here”.’
Phillip was 97 when Ponting was dismissed for 81. His new partner was a fretful Hussey, who was enduring a difficult tour after being targeted by the South African bowlers.
‘My chat in the middle was about the next ball,’ Hussey says. ‘I certainly didn’t detect any nerves from him. I was more stressed about my own game. He just said, “Stay positive”. It was calming, batting with him.’
Being calmed by a partner 13 years his junior felt entirely natural.
For five overs, Phillip fed Hussey the strike. Finally, Morkel offered an irresistible ball wide of off-stump, which Phillip slashed over gully. He removed his helmet and raised his bat. Hussey walked up to him and bowed, as if in worship. Phillip looked tired now, but was far from satisfied: he would bat for another two hours and take his score to 160. The South Africans kept at him with the verbal taunts, and he kept responding with a grin. One of the bowlers finally exclaimed: ‘Is he deaf?’
Watching on television, Neil D’Costa was seeing what he had seen for years, only on a bigger stage. ‘When he got in, he was hard to get out. He didn’t play stupid shots. He had brilliant risk management. If there was open space, he hit it in the air, but if there wasn’t, he’d hit it along the ground or hit it somewhere else. Another player would get a start and lose concentration in the middle of the innings. Phil didn’t. He was like Muhammad Ali. If he hurt you, he’d knock you out.’
Shortly after Phillip was dismissed, Ponting declared 545 runs in front. Phillip Hughes had become the youngest batsman in the 132 years of Test cricket to make two centuries in a Test match, beating a record set before World War II by the so-called ‘black Bradman’, the West Indian George Headley. Not that Phillip knew that. When he looked at the honour board of Test centurions at Kingsmead that he was about to join, his eyes skated over the older Australian names of Stan McCabe and Neil Harvey, recognised Mark Waugh and Ponting, but took especial satisfaction from one in particular. He might be no Matthew Hayden, but his name was going to be up on that board forever.
His comments, when he met the media at the end of the day, were low-key and humble. His first thoughts were for his parents, who had ‘come over for a fourth-ball duck’.
‘It was a special time to have my Mum and Dad at my first Test,’ he continued, ‘but they’ve flown back home and they were definitely watching on TV. The first phone call, I’ll call those guys.’
A proud Greg remembers that perhaps the people of Macksville were the only ones in the cricket world who were not too surprised. ‘The town was going wild. In his younger days, playing above his age group, he’d always deserved to go up to higher levels. Then he’d dominated Test bowlers for those 18 months in the Shield. He always believed he was an Australian Test cricketer. And now he’d shown everyone else.’
