In the wake of the 2009 Ashes tour, and indeed after each time he was dropped by Australia, Phillip Hughes lived two lives. The face that he showed the public and many friends and teammates was that of a young man who was admirably unaffected by setbacks. He continued scoring runs and loving batting, he revelled in his social life, and the snowball of his friendship continued rolling on and picking up new mates.
YET THE PRIVATE PHILLIP was also trying to outpace the shadow of disappointment. He would be in and out of the Australian Test team another three times by 2012, and in private the mask came off. He could not understand why he was not in the Test team. Nor could he understand why the national selectors seemed to have pigeonholed him as a ‘Test player’, if that, but not picking him for one-day and Twenty20 internationals. His inner circle and family saw and shared the disappointment, and it eventually affected his cricket relations with his club and his state.
On the home front, he kept things solid, with family at the centre. A new Cricket Australia deal gave him some financial freedom after his Test debut, and he bought a two-level penthouse apartment on the eighth floor of a building in Breakfast Point in May 2009. He didn’t want to live alone, however.
‘Even when we weren’t living together, we were at each other’s place every night and he always wanted you to sleep over,’ says Matt Day.
But by 2009, Day had shifted to Tasmania to push for a first-class career, and Phillip insisted that his brother Jason move in with him.
‘I wasn’t sure, because he might want his space, but he was definite about it,’ Jason says.
The unit had a beautiful view over the Parramatta River towards the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Phillip occasionally grumbled that he wanted ‘a single-floor unit on the ground floor’, that he hated waiting for the lift and running up and down the stairs between the bedroom and the living area, but he was showing signs of domesticity.
To christen his new table, he invited friends over and said he was going to cook dinner. They traipsed down to the Breakfast Point IGA and bought a roast chicken, a loaf of white bread, balsamic vinegar, a Spanish onion, tomatoes and lettuce. In the unit, Phillip made chicken salad sandwiches and proudly served them on his new table: the one meal his mates can remember him ever ‘cooking’.
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TWO MONTHS HAD PASSED since his previous cricket match when he padded up for a pair of NSW trial matches in Lismore in late September 2009. His teammates included Simon Keen, his former Under-19s captain who now played with the Campbelltown club and had represented NSW in Twenty20 cricket. Keen had also worked with D’Costa, who ‘always wanted me to watch everything Hughesy did’.
Their careers had gone in different directions, but when Keen came into the NSW squad he found that Phillip was no different, ‘always asking about my family, about what I was doing, far more interested in hearing about my life than talking about his’.
Knowing that Phillip loved boxing, Keen gave him some training mitts.
‘It was like Christmas – he was so appreciative to be given something. He could afford mitts by then – he was in the Australian team! – but that was his caring side, to show how much it meant to him.’
The previous summer, Keen had been dropped for the final of the Big Bash League (BBL), when NSW had parachuted the New Zealand star, Brendon McCullum, into the side. At a moment when Keen was feeling quite low, he says, ‘Phil made me feel such a part of it, and he went out of his way to make my parents part of it too.’
As BBL finalists, NSW had qualified for the Twenty20 Champions League in India in October 2009, which would be Phillip’s first serious cricket since his axing from the Australian Test team. Twenty20 cricket was still in its infancy. The Indian Premier League had started in 2008, and the Australian team had only played a sum total of 25 matches in the format since their first effort, an exhibition game against New Zealand in 2005. The Champions League would bring together the top two teams from domestic Twenty20 tournaments throughout the cricket world. With his flamboyant style and fast run rate, Phillip would appear made for Twenty20, and he certainly thought so, even if the national selectors were preferring Shane Watson and David Warner as their opening batsmen.
Warner, in contrast to Phillip, was in danger of being pigeonholed as a Twenty20 slugger. A classmate of Phillip’s at the Centre of Excellence in 2007, Warner had made his Australian Twenty20 debut in January 2009 at the MCG, marking the night match against South Africa by manhandling Dale Steyn, Makhaya Ntini and Morne Morkel, crashing an unforgettable 89 off 43 balls. But Warner had still only played one first-class match, coincidentally in the same week Phillip had scored his twin centuries in Durban. Amid the excitement of Phillip’s batting in South Africa, Warner’s Sheffield Shield debut went unnoticed by the wider cricket world.
As opening partners in Twenty20 cricket, Phillip and Warner meshed instantly. Having guided NSW to victory in the BBL, they now took on international attacks on one of the lowest and most fiendish Indian wickets, at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium in Delhi, and a faster surface at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad, where NSW defeated the Diamond Eagles of South Africa, Sussex, Somerset and Victoria to advance to the final against Trinidad and Tobago, the only team to conquer them in the preliminary rounds. For the Champions League tournament, Phillip topped the NSW averages and Warner the aggregates. Phillip’s strike rate of 108.02 would not be high by today’s standards, but each of his significant innings was perfectly paced to put his team in a winning position.
‘Between him and Davey, and Binga [Brett Lee] was outstanding, they won the tournament for us,’ says Daniel Smith, who batted in the middle order.
D’Costa, who travelled to matches from his Vidarbha Academy base in Jaipur, says simply, ‘He won the Champions League on bad wickets. He found a way. He won it for NSW.’
Team coach Matthew Mott was intrigued by how quickly and accurately Phillip and Warner could assess conditions. Their cricket brains were instrumental in NSW’s success.
‘They were foundation players of the T20 game, deeply into tactics,’ Mott says. ‘A coach is thinking it’s necessary to get off to a flier, but they’re sending messages back that a score of 130 or 140 is par – and they were always right.’
Warner smiles at the memory. ‘A few people said Hughesy and I weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and it was funny, every time we sent a message back, the guys had to second-guess us. They weren’t sure if we were being sensible or not.’
As a combination, Mott says, they succeeded because ‘They never seemed to try to outdo each other. Ego got taken out of it. They fed each other the strike when the other was going well, and they hit in such different areas. A good ball to Davey was in Hughesy’s hitting arc, and vice versa. It really tested the bowlers.’
Ben Rohrer watched their batting with the security of knowing that he would mostly enter the game upon a sound platform built by the openers.
‘As an opening batter, Phil was also hard to get out. It was amazing to watch some of the shots he and Davey played when nobody else could time it. Phil could cut low balls, I don’t know how, get balls past point. Davey hit more straight, so they were hard to bowl to.’
Daniel Smith, jokingly, has a different explanation for their success. ‘On that wicket in Delhi that wouldn’t bounce over knee-high, it was lucky having a couple of midgets opening the batting. It was ankle-high for us, but good pace and bounce for them! But seriously, they got together and got the job done.’
Phillip and Warner failed to fire in the final, but NSW defeated the Trinidadians by 41 runs, Lee and Steve Smith starring with both bat and ball. When Phillip caught Dave Mohammed off Stuart Clark, the celebrations could begin.
Those who played in that NSW team echo Daniel Smith’s assessment that it was ‘one of the best tours I’ve ever been on’. Mott says ‘it was such a novel idea, it freed everyone up. I’ve never had a better time with a bunch of players’.
Predictably, many of the stories that emerged from the tour had Phillip Hughes somewhere involved. On the field, where Indian tours can get particularly frustrating, Phillip was amusing his teammates with his idiosyncratic catching technique.
‘He had a really good set of hands,’ says Mott, ‘but he had this habit of pointing his fingers up even on low catches. The boys would imitate that, going lower and lower while still keeping their fingers pointed up. But when he took a catch, he celebrated like he’d scored a century.’
Mott recalls the day when Phillip and Warner were practising together and Warner was hitting a supply of new balls out of the ground, one after another.
Seeing hundreds of dollars’ worth of cricket balls disappearing, Mott rushed up and said, ‘Stop it, it’s killing my budget!’
Phillip was surprised. ‘Do you have a budget, Matty?’
‘Yeah.’
With a grin, Phillip said, ‘You get on well with Gilbo – you can sort it!’
Mott laughs not only about Phillip’s naïve optimism about the coach explaining his budget problem to the NSW chief executive, but because ‘he called Dave Gilbert “Gilbo”, and he called me “Matty”. Nobody else called us that. He just made up these nicknames and ran with them’.
In the card games that fill the hours on an Indian tour, Phillip was a keen participant, without noticing how eager his teammates were to include him.
‘He was a better cricketer than a punter,’ Mott says. ‘I think they used him to line their pockets.’
But all of Phillip’s teammates enjoyed getting to know him. The tour went for three weeks and comprised six evenings of cricket, so there was ample downtime. At the end of a travel day, Rohrer and Moisés Henriques were having a quiet drink in their hotel bar when Phillip joined them at two in the morning. He was only drinking coffee, but he drank it prodigiously, sitting up and chatting until the sun was rising.
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REFRESHED BY THE CHAMPIONS League tour, Phillip launched himself into another bumper season for NSW, reaping 953 Sheffield Shield runs at 56.05, another 221 at 27.62 in the Ford Ranger Cup, and topping the NSW averages in the BBL. In his demeanour and his output, he gave teammates no indication that he was suffering over his omission from the Australian team, which was playing three-Test home series against the West Indies and Pakistan. Watson and Katich were entrenched as the Test openers, but Phillip was doing precisely what was expected of him: consistently scoring runs and piling them up at the selectors’ gate until it fell in.
In all but one of NSW’s five Sheffield Shield matches before Christmas, Phillip scored at least a half-century, forming a reliable opening partnership with Phil Jaques. Nothing was mentioned about the ‘bat-off’ the previous year. Both were striving to make it back into the Australian team, but Jaques, who roomed with Phillip when Daniel Smith was not in the team, knew he was ceding the ground.
‘I did everything I could to help him get where he wanted to go. If a person turns out to be better than you and takes your spot, then that is part of the natural progression of the game.’
In the last Shield fixture before the mid-season hiatus for the BBL, Phillip scored a timely 122 against Victoria in Newcastle. His ally for a 120-run partnership was Rohrer, who admired Phillip’s apparent inability to hold a grudge over his stalled Test career.
‘Even after getting dropped, you wouldn’t have known. I can’t remember a day when he didn’t have a smile on his face around the group. He was always the same cheeky little bugger, he never acted cranky. Some guys are up and down, but Phil, you wouldn’t know what was happening from his mood, because he was always on that level. I think that had a lot to do with why he was always able to score runs.’
The national selectors let him know that he was in their sights, calling him up for the second Test match of the series at the SCG, in place of the injured Katich. He knew he was in as a replacement, but a good performance would get him on the coming tour to New Zealand, and if he got there, the opportunity to regain his place might arise. He couldn’t wish Katich or Watson to fail, but if they did, he could make sure he was next man up.
Australia was one–nil up in the series with Pakistan, but any hopes Phillip had of posting a big first-innings score were dented by his own captain. Never having forgotten the price he had paid for sending England in to bat at Edgbaston in 2005, Ponting abided by the old W.G. Grace orthodoxy of ‘When winning the toss, bat first. Very occasionally consider bowling – and then bat first’.
On a humid morning under skies dark enough to require the SCG floodlights, Ponting walked out to toss with Mohammad Yousuf. In the changing room, one of the Australian players said, ‘Surely he’s not going to bat.’
Mike Hussey replied, ‘He batted first on a pitch like plasticine in Johannesburg.’
Ponting won the toss, and batted.
Phillip was the first to go, and Ponting was out a ball later. Australia lasted a mere 44.2 overs as Mohammed Sami and Mohammed Asif ran through them with high-quality swing and seam bowling. Pakistan led by 206 runs when Phillip and Watson went in again on the third morning. Phillip scored 37, laying a foundation for Australia’s 381, which was enhanced when Hussey and Siddle took advantage of some bizarre field placings to add 123 for the ninth wicket and give Pakistan 176 to chase. They collapsed, and such was the past behaviour of Pakistan teams and the subsequent claims of a convicted criminal bookmaker, Australia’s dramatic 36-run win had an asterisk against it.
With his duck and 37, Phillip might not have done enough to book his ticket to New Zealand as a reserve batsman, but he did so on NSW’s southern tour, scoring 149 against Victoria at the MCG and 192 against South Australia at the Adelaide Oval.
Now in his third year as a Sheffield Shield player, he was welcoming new state teammates from his junior days. Khawaja, who had first batted with him as a schoolboy, was cementing a place at number three and re-establishing their friendship on and off the field.
‘We’d both get to the SCG for games really early,’ Khawaja says, ‘because we had a long way to travel and we didn’t want to risk getting caught in traffic. We both loved our sleep, and when we got there, we’d go into the back of the changing rooms and take a nap. We called it the bat cave.’
Another reunion was with medium-fast bowler Trent Copeland who, like Khawaja, had first played with Phillip for Combined High Schools. Hailing from the central coast and having risen outside the network of elite junior development, Copeland, then 23, played his first Shield match against Queensland at the SCG three weeks after the Test match. He recalls that Phillip ‘was one of the first guys to come up and make you feel part of it. He knew in his own mind what it was like to come from the country and try to make it in the city.’
Practising for the match, Copeland bowled in the SCG nets to Phillip and Katich.
‘I was thinking how good they were, they were just so different. I remember thinking, “I just can’t bowl the way I bowl in grade cricket”. Katich walked across and anything I bowled on the stumps, he hit to leg. To Hughesy, it was hit the other way.’
The next day, Katich sent Queensland in to bat on a green wicket. Bowling first change, Copeland struggled to break through initially. ‘I thought I bowled all right, but I was none-for in my first spell and I thought, “Jeez, this could be a long day”. But every time Hughesy came up to me, he would say, “Not bad, are you, bruzzy?”’
Copeland began to believe in himself and the wickets began to fall. He took eight in Queensland’s innings, three caught behind by Daniel Smith and one in slips by Phillip.
‘Every time I got a wicket, he gave me his handshake that finished with a click of the fingers, and he would say, “You’re here, aren’t you bruz, you are here!”’
A fortnight later, Phillip enjoyed a vintage southern swing. Against Victoria, with NSW trailing by 193 on the first innings and three early wickets down in the second, he put on a blazing five-runs-per-over partnership with Steve Smith to give his team fleeting hope. Eventual defeat in that game had NSW struggling to make the Shield final, but in Adelaide Phillip did his best to get them there. Jaques and Katich fell in the first session, before Phillip and Forrest put on 265 in even time.
‘I remember him cutting the second ball of the game for six,’ says Forrest, who had batted with Phillip when he made 198 on the oval the previous summer. ‘He was on.’
After tea, Phillip gave an example of what colleagues were seeing as an irrepressible independence of mind. During the break, with NSW two for 214, Mott sat down with Phillip and Forrest and said, ‘OK, do the hard work now and get to the end of the day.’
The coach could see that on a flat wicket, NSW’s best hope of winning was batting just once and amassing a huge total over two days. After listening to Mott’s directions, Phillip and Forrest walked quietly to the wicket. The first ball after tea, from left-armer Gary Putland, Phillip hoicked over mid-wicket.
A disbelieving Forrest walked up. ‘What are you doing?’
Phillip grinned. ‘I’m going him, braz.’
‘The wicket suited us,’ Forrest says, ‘and I thought, “Surely he’s going to make 200 today”.’
But on 192, Phillip was bowled by left-arm spinner Aaron O’Brien. ‘I thought, “A 200 must be hard to get if Hughesy can’t get one,”’ Forrest says.
Forrest and Rohrer brought up centuries to enable Katich to declare at six for 565 on the second day, but Josh Hazlewood, the teenaged right-arm paceman from Tamworth, had broken down in the nets and coach Mott called on Steve O’Keefe to take the new ball with Copeland.
Four years older than Phillip, the left-arm spinner and handy lower-order batsman had been in the NSW system for nearly a decade. O’Keefe had played in countless emerging players’ teams and NSW Second XIs (including with Phillip in 2007) but until that season had only managed a single Sheffield Shield game in 2005–06. O’Keefe was always amused by Phillip’s self-confidence. In Phillip’s rookie year, O’Keefe had given him a lift home from training and advised him, with the hard-won knowledge of one who had met many frustrations, ‘Mate, it takes a couple of years to find your feet, but be patient’.
‘I was just trying to pass on a bit of knowledge,’ O’Keefe says. ‘He didn’t say much, I don’t think he believed me anyway. Six months later he’d scored a hundred in a Shield final to beat the Vics. He had just gone flying past me.’
Now, in late 2009, O’Keefe had been recalled by NSW but was hanging on to his place by his fingernails. Feeling the pressure of opening the bowling against South Australia, he toiled through some 25 overs to finish the day wicketless.
‘I completely had my head up my bum,’ O’Keefe says. ‘I thought, “You have completely stuffed your career as a spinner, you’re never gonna make it now. This was your one shot and you’ve blown it”.’
After the NSW team sat down in the changing room, O’Keefe was on his own, beating himself up. Phillip sat next to him and said, ‘You did a good job today, eh, bruzzy?’
‘Not that long before, I was trying to give him advice,’ O’Keefe says, ‘and here he was, looking out for me. Next morning, I kept going and I was bowling to Aaron O’Brien outside the footmarks. He cut a couple for four so I started to bowl them straight. Hughesy comes up to me and says, “Bruzzy, not straight, he can’t keep cutting them, eh? Just keep putting it there”.
‘The very next over, O’Brien went to cut one out of the rough, it hit his handle, caught and bowled. Hughesy came up, didn’t say anything, but just gave me his little flick handshake.’
O’Keefe went on to take three wickets in each innings, helping NSW to a convincing win.
From Adelaide they travelled to Hobart, where Phillip’s first order of business was to make contact with Matt Day, who was trying to crack the Tasmanian team.
‘He’d make me come and eat with him and sleep at the hotel, or he’d stay at my place,’ Day says.
The game also brought Ed Cowan back into contact with Phillip, this time as an opponent. Cowan had moved to Tasmania to gain more regular state cricket than he could manage in the congested NSW top order and had drifted out of regular contact with Phillip.
‘Playing against him, I saw the other side of the coin. He loved his teammates. You might have been his friend, but you weren’t his great mate if you weren’t on his team. I’d send him texts if he was playing well, but it was a different relationship. And he always seemed to get runs against Tassie.’
NSW batted first, Phillip and Jaques putting on a masterclass on a damp wicket in the first session.
‘It was one of those wickets where if you played down the line, eventually there would be a ball with your name on it,’ Copeland says. ‘They both had this attitude where they attacked, so that the bowlers had to try different lengths and take catchers out. When you are going hard at balls outside off, they fly further too. They didn’t think like your normal opening batsmen. They thought, “What do the bowlers not want us to do?”’
O’Keefe agrees. ‘That takes courage and wisdom. You would think a bloke would be thinking, “Just don’t throw your wicket away and look stupid here”. But he tended to just take it on.’
Phillip was out 25 minutes before lunch, having scored 58 off 80 balls. NSW had 115 on the board. The wicket had dried out, and Steve Smith would be able to use the opening partnership as a launchpad for his 177, a score he would never exceed in Phillip’s lifetime. It was Smith’s third first-class century. Phillip, also 21 years old, had scored thirteen.
NSW came home with a rush of four wins, but finished one win behind the second Shield finalist Queensland. Had NSW made the final, Phillip would have missed it in any case, as an injury to Watson triggered another call from the Australian selectors for the first Test match against New Zealand in Wellington.
Opening with Katich, Phillip scored 20 in the first innings of a game that is better remembered for Michael Clarke’s unbeaten 168. Clarke had just borne the cost of his high public profile, when his break-up with his fiancée, model Lara Bingle, became tabloid fodder. Clarke had left the Australian team to sort out his personal life, and then returned for the match in which, supported by his teammates, he hit his then highest Test score.
Australia’s five for 459 (declared) put them in a position to force New Zealand to bat twice. Left 106 to win, Phillip and Katich went out to bat late on the fourth afternoon. Phillip gritted his teeth, knowing that whatever he did, he would be omitted for the second Test, Watson having recovered.
Phillip survived an early chance and then thought, ‘Stuff it, I’m going to motor’.
He blazed away, reminding the cricket world of what he had done in Durban just 12 months earlier, cracking a dozen fours and one six in a memorable hour and a half. In 75 balls, he scored 86 not out. Greg says, ‘He was in great form and played his natural game. Even if he was going to get left out again, he knew that the best place to be was to be the next spare batsman in line.’
Katich, with 18 off 65 balls, was a delighted and somewhat bemused spectator. It didn’t matter to Phillip either way. He was going to be dropped again, but he would leave them something to remember.
