FOURTEEN

HARD WORK

While with the Australian team as cover for Katich for the third Test against Pakistan in Hobart, Phillip made an important career move. Aside from Neil D’Costa and his father Greg, Phillip had never had anyone act as his manager. On Michael Clarke’s suggestion, Phillip approached James Henderson, CEO of DSEG, who managed Ricky Ponting. Clarke told Phillip that Henderson would be a perfect fit for him: Ponting was DSEG’s only cricket client, and Henderson’s experience and network could help Phillip while letting him focus on his cricket. Ponting was also strongly encouraging the link.

PHILLIP MET HENDERSON IN the Qantas Club at Sydney Airport a few weeks after the Hobart Test. ‘Hughesy put me through the wringer,’ Henderson says. ‘It felt like my first ever job interview. But the longer we chatted, the more I wanted to work with him.’

They met again at an east Sydney cafe later in the summer, Phillip bringing his cousin Nino along. ‘By now,’ Henderson says, ‘I’d bought into Phillip Hughes hook, line and sinker. He was 21, but put me through a process far more complex than any CEO I’d done business with. All I wanted was the phone call to say he wanted me to manage him.’ The call soon came and the two drew up a strategy that would give Hughes the momentum he needed to return to the Australian Test team. ‘The plan highlighted the importance of continuous cricket, regular trips home to regenerate when tired and, above all, continuing to train and work hard on his cricket and control everything that was under his control,’ Henderson says. ‘If he did this, then everything else would take care of itself.’

Hughes was suffering anguish from not being in the Australian team but knew he could only survive in the public eye if he could disguise his frustrations.

Tim Nielsen, who as Australian coach had seen Hughes in and out of the Test team three times within the year, admits, ‘Doing it tough was not unique to Hughesy. We take away something they desperately want by not selecting them when they’re screaming to play. We support them as much as we can. But I don’t know what goes on when they go back to their bedroom or their family or their private place. Everyone’s different. He was struggling in his own way. We hoped that that was all part of the process of developing the mental strength so he wouldn’t go through this again.’

But Hughes was not letting the frustration show outside his inner circle. ‘It didn’t matter what form he was in or how he was going, he was always the same person, which was something I loved,’ says Trent Copeland. ‘He might have been down at home, but at training he was always the same. He always made you feel welcome.’

There seemed no quick way back in. Watson was batting as well as he ever had, and Katich was Australia’s most consistent player. Yet, as everyone kept reminding him, he was still 21. He had years ahead of him.

He began preparing himself physically for an Australia A tour to Sri Lanka and, he hoped, Australia’s next Test tour. Since the Lahore terrorist attack in 2009, Pakistan were playing their international matches on neutral territory, and their scheduled two-Test series against Australia in July 2010 would be played at Lord’s and Headingley. Hughes hoped he would be taken as the reserve batsman, and looked forward to proving a point on English soil if the opportunity arose.

In May, Cricket NSW announced that Hughes had badly dislocated his shoulder in a training mishap. There was no cover-up about his having hurt himself while boxing, though the precise circumstances were kept quiet.

The truth was that Hughes’s passion for boxing had struck again. When he was injured, he was with a group of mates, mucking around with boxing gloves and headgear. One of his friends was Nathan Brown, a talented young Western Suburbs cricketer and rugby league player four years Hughes’s junior. Hughes had mentored Brown, giving him a cricket bat and welcoming him into his inner circle.

Brown was much bigger than Hughes. They were sparring, and Hughes threw a punch. He connected with Brown and his shoulder popped out. He lay on the ground, screaming in pain, ‘Put it back in! Put it back in!’

His friends got him into a car and rushed him to Concord Hospital. He was operated on by top surgeon Greg Hoy, but the injury ruled him out of the Pakistan series and probably the tour after, to India in October. That is, if he was even a candidate; his schoolboy teammates Usman Khawaja and Steve Smith were now in line to take the junior batting slot for the trip to England.

A dark winter for Hughes at least gave him the chance to deepen his friendship with Clarke. Although close, Clarke and Hughes had been separated by age and geography, with Clarke’s international cricket commitments limiting his time in the same place as Hughes. Since Hughes’s arrival in Sydney, Clarke had invited him to house-sit when he lived in Breakfast Point and Lilli Pilli. Now Clarke lived in Bondi – alone, after his split with Bingle – and Hughes moved in with him for around a month.

‘We were both going through personal problems and it was a good time for us to have company. Both of us were getting our anger and frustration out,’ Clarke says. ‘It wasn’t planned that way, but that’s how it was.’

The friendship developed into a fraternal bond. Hughes offered what consolation he could about Clarke’s failed engagement, and Clarke helped Hughes’s rehabilitation. There was one incurable incompatibility – ‘I don’t drink coffee, so I wouldn’t accept his 150 invitations a day,’ Clarke laughs – but they bonded over food, cricket and nights out together. It was the start of a new phase of companionship between the Western Suburbs clubmates.

Clarke went to England with the Australian team in July, another reminder of where Hughes sat. Once he regained mobility in his shoulder, he signed a short-term contract with the Hampshire club, with whom Clarke and Shane Warne had played. It was a strategic move to be in England while the Test team was there, in case a call-up arose, and also to gain further experience in English conditions, but Hughes scored just 85 runs in three county matches and 33 runs in two 40-over games.

Off the field, Greg Hughes says, ‘It didn’t really work out. They were an older team, he said a lot of them were married with kids, and he didn’t have a great time.’

Hughes went to India but did not play a game, which, says D’Costa, who was still coaching him from time to time, ‘he didn’t like at all’. Steve Smith had broken into the Test team in the middle-order, while Watson and Katich were the strongpoint of the Australian batting at the top.

India was Hughes’s most miserable tour. After two weeks of watching, the one-day series started and he was sent home to play for NSW.

IN AN INTERVIEW LATE in 2010, Hughes said, ‘I want to concentrate on playing for NSW and I want to dominate this season. I want to improve. I want to dominate more than I did last year and the year before and the year before that.’

It was strong talk, and reflected the mentoring he had been receiving from James Henderson and Justin Langer. Hughes had travelled to Perth during the spring to spend time at the Australian batting coach’s home. With a Test career that amounted to 7696 runs at 45.27 in 105 matches, Langer had made the most of his gifts and then some.

Langer was a cricket workaholic. Mike Hussey recalls a Perth club match when Langer, after being dismissed, in full view of the players on the field, spent the afternoon running up and down a steep hill. For Langer, the answer to almost any problem in cricket was work. When that wasn’t enough, the answer was more work.

Langer was an intriguing model for Hughes. Langer had come back from being omitted by Australia four times between his debut at 22 and his final return at 31, after which he played 64 Test matches. If anyone could teach Hughes about the long game on the field and in life, it was Langer.

Langer admits that he ‘tried to smash him. I had just finished playing and I had this idea of setting up an academy, and I almost used him as a test case. I thought if I am going to do an academy, I am going to do it differently from everyone else. It had to be hardcore. I tried to break him to see what he had, but I couldn’t do it.

‘Before a Test, I used to run a hundred hundreds, a hundred singles, and I made him do it on City Beach on the sand, which is bloody hard. He did it and said, “OK, what’s next?” I did boxing with him. I put him on the bowling machine and tested him with the short ball, but he handled that. I tried running him between batting sessions, and he just couldn’t get enough of it. I thought he was crazy, but that was how I gained so much respect and affection for him, because I know that anyone who is that hungry will do well.’

Langer gained confirmation when he took Hughes for sessions with Bob Meuleman, who had been the batting coach for both Langer and Adam Gilchrist. Meuleman said to Langer afterwards that ‘if there is anyone in Australian cricket I want to coach, it’s Phil Hughes’.

Langer and his family developed a strong affection for Hughes.

‘Women’s instinct is very strong,’ Langer says, and his wife Sue ‘absolutely loved him. He’s in our house with two teenage girls and two younger ones . . . The whole family adored him, and that said a lot to me. We were discussing him marrying one of the girls or adoption! We wanted him as either a son or a son-in-law.’

One facet of Hughes’s personality that the Langers discovered, in unusual circumstances, was his love of sleep.

One night while Hughes was at the Langers’, a candle started a fire in their kitchen. Langer got up and put it out, but ‘there was smoke everywhere, the girls were all up and screaming and panicking’. A fire engine arrived. ‘Hughesy didn’t even know. He was absolutely oblivious to everything that was going on, he’d slept right through it.’

Strengthened by his time with Langer, confident in the plan he had developed with Henderson, and hardened by the winter’s frustrations, Hughes began the season determined to dominate. But something was not clicking. After three low scores in domestic one-day matches, he made just 56 runs in his first three Shield innings. Picked for an Australia A team to play Andrew Strauss’s touring Englishmen in Hobart, he was out to the towering Chris Tremlett for two in the first innings, but made a steady 81 in the second, figuring in a big partnership with Victoria’s Cameron White, as England ground towards an ominous ten-wicket win.

That would be Hughes’s only half-century in first-class cricket before February. While this was his leanest season so far, the landscape was tilting his way. At the beginning of the season, Greg Chappell was appointed to the national selection panel. The former Test captain and batting great publicly stated his advocacy for youth, and took some credit in his earlier stint as an Australian selector for the promotion of then-unproven young players such as Craig McDermott, Steve Waugh and Ian Healy. Chappell believed that selectors should be looking for champions, and, as nearly all of the Australian champions in history had emerged while very young, they should be looking not for journeymen and stopgaps but for young players of potential greatness. Although Chappell was working as a selector under Andrew Hilditch’s chairmanship, there was little doubting his influence.

‘We were only waiting for him to give us an excuse to pick him,’ says Chappell, who had observed Hughes at close range at the Centre of Excellence. ‘I knew of him before I knew him because he stood out so much for his immense talent. He knew how to make runs and adapted to every level he played at. You knew he was going to be a good international player.’

Chappell does not disapprove of the then-selectors’ treatment of Hughes in 2009. ‘When they run into their first big setback, they sometimes need time to get away. Most of our best players have needed that early in their career, and have come back with their games improved.’

That said, he had absolute faith in Hughes’s future. ‘We had no doubt that at some point he was going to be a very, very, good international player in the long term. He was always going to be hungry enough to make it work. When he scored runs, he scored big runs. That was another reason we liked him. He scored his runs quickly, but we needed him to learn to survive good bowling so he could then score his runs. Some openers are just surviving all the time, but he had the capacity to get through those tough periods and then up the tempo.’

As selector, Chappell also brought a forceful view that would work in Hughes’s favour. ‘A thing that is often overlooked is that to be a good Test cricketer, you have to play Test cricket. There’s no other way to learn. Whether you’ve played ten or 110 first-class games, it will take you time to adjust to Test cricket.’

Chappell and the other selectors gained their chance when Katich tore his Achilles tendon in the second Ashes Test match in Adelaide. Sweeping changes were demanded after England’s heavy win, and Hughes was recalled for the third Test match in Perth, along with Steve Smith, Mitchell Johnson and Ben Hilfenhaus.

While some state players had noticed a more subdued Hughes during the spring and suspected that the scars were beginning to show, once he was in the Australian set-up he was his normal ebullient self.

‘He hadn’t changed much as a bloke,’ says Nielsen. ‘He was still confident about taking the opposition on. All the best players in the world have had to reflect on their games in some time away. He’d probably reflected on the difference between Shield and Test cricket, on how you might have one very good bowler to face in a Shield team whereas in Test cricket you have four. It’s unrelenting.’

Mike Hussey, whose middle-order resistance had held Australia’s batting together in the Ashes Tests in Brisbane and Adelaide, noticed ‘small changes in Hughesy’s technique’ when he came back, but ‘his work ethic was outstanding, as it always had been. He loved training, he took being dropped on the chin, he just asked, “What do I need to do to get better?”’

With another Hussey century and destructive bowling from Johnson and Ryan Harris, Australia crushed England by 267 runs at the WACA. Hughes scored two and 12, finding the bounce as hard to handle as the Englishmen did.

The Australians spent Christmas in a mood of febrile confidence. They were brought to earth at the MCG, a calamitous first day leading to an innings defeat that left the Ashes in England’s hands. Another one-sided loss followed in Sydney, where Clarke was Australian Test captain for the first time in Ponting’s injury-enforced absence and Khawaja made a highly praised debut.

In each of his four innings in Melbourne and Sydney, Hughes had made starts (16, 23, 31 and 13). Uncharacteristically, he could not go on. The English seam bowlers James Anderson, Tim Bresnan and Tremlett were troubling all of the Australian batsmen, but Hughes was annoyed by his inability to produce a match-turning innings, and at home during and after that period, his brother Jason noticed a growing moodiness.

‘People always said how cheerful he was, but some days he didn’t want to play. It was hard for him.’

Henderson was also aware of how flat Hughes had become and started speaking to a number of influential administrators, players and coaches – including Michael Brown (Cricket Australia’s Head of Cricket) and Greg Chappell – to gather as much information as possible to give Hughes targets to work towards.

Just as hard for Hughes was not being considered for the ICC World Cup on the subcontinent in early 2011. But his recent domestic one-day form did not warrant selection, and he knew he had to work hard in the remaining four Sheffield Shield matches to keep his Test spot for Australia’s next series in Sri Lanka later that year.

At the SCG, Hughes was working with Mott and the state batting coach, the former 100-Test England left-hander Graham Thorpe.

‘He was a low-maintenance player who didn’t need a lot of coaching and always put the team first,’ Mott says. ‘He was always clear that Neil D’Costa was his confidant, so we would be careful not to talk too technically with Hughesy, but Graham Thorpe was unbelievably good in talking about Test cricket and the lengths they would bowl and the mindset that was needed.’ Even in his low times, Mott says, Hughes had an ‘infectious attitude towards scoring runs. Every session had a real clear purpose. He always wanted to get something out of it.’

Results came belatedly that summer. Opening with Warner against Western Australia at the SCG in March, Hughes spanked 54 in the first innings and, in front of Test selector Chappell, played a measured, match-winning knock of 122 in the second. He was back to his best.

NSW, chasing 251 to win, lost Warner and Jaques late on the third day and wicketkeeper–batsman Peter Nevill on the third ball of the last day. Hughes put on 76 runs with Katich before sealing the victory with a century partnership with Ben Rohrer, who recalls, ‘When it was properly on the line, he always made runs’.

It was on the line again the next week, when NSW travelled to Hobart for the Sheffield Shield final. As usual, he contacted Matt Day before the match: friendship first, Shield final second, even though Day was a reserve fieldsman for Tasmania. Hughes missed a ride on the team bus so that he could give Day a hit in the nets. ‘Even mid-game, he fed me balls, even though I was on the opposing team, ’ Day says. ‘That’s the kind of guy he was.’

His generosity, says Day, remained unchanged. ‘Whenever he had new bats, he’d say, “Come and get a bat”. If I happened to pick the one that was his favourite, he’d say, “Don’t worry, just take it”.’

On the first day of the final, the conditions at Bellerive were overcast and moist, so Tasmanian captain George Bailey sent NSW in. ‘Tassie were content to wear us down but Phil threw down the gauntlet,’ Mott says.

Warner made a bright 47, but he, Khawaja and Jaques were out in quick succession before Hughes put on a positive, initiative-seizing 180 runs that afternoon with Katich. Matt Day was on the field for one over, ‘the over he brought up his century’. In the shadow of stumps, Hughes was out for 138, his best innings of the season.

Henderson, who was born in Tasmania and still has close ties with the state, watched Hughes make that century from the Chairman’s Lounge. ‘I had never ever barracked against my home state,’ he says, ‘but I did that day as Phillip carved up the Tassie attack. It was the best innings I had ever seen him play live and he was sending another message to the selectors that he was a run-scoring machine. I think I actually led a standing ovation from the Tassie faithful as he left the field that night.’

Thanks to Hughes, NSW made 440 in their first innings at nearly four an over. But Tasmania only needed a draw in the five-day match to win the Shield, and Ed Cowan dug in for a seven-hour 133. The Tasmanians took two days to eke out 453, but when Hughes went back out with Warner on the fourth morning, there was still hope if NSW could put on 250 to 300 runs and declare late that day.

Instead, Warner and Khawaja fell in Hilfenhaus’s second and third overs, and Hughes and Jaques were forced to consolidate. They added 181, but their run rate of three an over was falling behind the clock if they were to get Tasmania back in. Their scoring was restricted by tight bowling and Bailey’s clever captaincy but, Bailey says, Hughes and Jaques ‘batted so slowly that we had a couple of conversations about keeping them both in . . . We felt they lost sight of the fact they needed to win the game. It was the age-old cricketing dilemma. To my mind Hughesy was always about scoring runs, knowing that generally this was the best way to help the team. However, on this occasion we thought they got it wrong and were a little selfish. Fine line!’

Hughes made 93 off 178 balls, Jaques 94 off 156 – reasonable strike rates in normal circumstances – but Katich was only able to set a target of 203 and get four overs at the Tasmanian openers that evening. The hosts cruised home by six wickets on the last day.

Still, for Hughes a depressing home summer had ended on an upswing. Desperate to put his name forward as a one-day batsman, he went to the Centre of Excellence in Brisbane during the winter to work on his game with Khawaja. The pair were both in the Australia A team to tour Zimbabwe in July for three first-class matches, but they also wanted to press their claims for a one-day Tri Series, involving South Africa A, that would precede the main tour. Neither had been chosen in the limited-overs squad.

Early in the series, however, Matthew Wade who had been taken as a specialist batsman, and his roommate, up-and-coming NSW teenager Nic Maddinson, were both injured. Nielsen sat down with Hughes and Khawaja. To Khawaja, he said, ‘We want you to do some more work before you go for the one-day games.’ To Hughes, he said, ‘You’re going.’

Hughes already had a four-year goal to make the Australian one-day team for the 2015 World Cup on home soil. He flew to Harare for the final of the Tri Series. There were no playing outfits for him, so he had to wear Maddinson’s, which were a couple of sizes too big.

Against a South Africa A attack including future Test bowlers Vernon Philander and Rory Kleinveldt, Hughes and Warner crashed 206 runs off 37.3 overs. Warner was first out for 120 off 127 balls, but Hughes exceeded him that day, steering Australia to 290 before missing a big hit off Philander. Warner recalls the joy of batting with Hughes in limited-overs cricket. ‘We would always say, “You are on, cock!” when one of us hit a good shot. If I hit a six he would say, “You are on, brazzy!” We would have a laugh, it was funny.’

With 138 from 138 balls, Hughes’s four-year plan had kicked off. And then, with a run-out and a catch, he helped Australia to victory by two runs.

Opening the batting with Warner in the first-class matches, Hughes was now a senior member of a team of his contemporaries led by Tasmanian wicketkeeper Tim Paine. Hughes’s and Warner’s lowest opening partnership in three innings was 58, and in the four-day match in Harare, Hughes made a patient five-hour 125 to set up an Australian win.

Khawaja remembers how Hughes always kept the mood light with his foibles. He played up his unworldliness in a canny way, and was smart enough to build friendships through humour.

At a lunch break on the Zimbabwean tour, a ‘deer curry’ was served.

‘Phil was sitting there, staring at the curry, and at me, and back at the curry,’ Khawaja says.

Finally, Hughes said, ‘Are you going to eat it?’

Khawaja smiled. ‘Don’t you eat that in Macksville?’

‘Just the Angus,’ Hughes said. ‘Just the Angus.’

Teammates were growing used to Hughes’s unquenchable love for Angus cattle. Khawaja already knew of Hughes’s keen knowledge of farm animals. ‘When he came to my parents’ place in Sydney, he knew all the types of chickens in the backyard, he loved them.’

But his love of cattle was something else. At times, Hughes would be proudly showing photos on his phone to someone, and a curious teammate would sidle up, expecting to see a girlfriend. Invariably Hughes was showing off his favourite cattle.

‘He’d talk about an especially good-looking one,’ Khawaja laughs. ‘I had no idea what he was talking about!’

During the 2013 Ashes tour, the Australian team bus was on a long drive through the English countryside.

‘Everyone was really tired, and we’d been driving for ages,’ says Ashton Agar. ‘Suddenly Hughesy stood up and called out, “Look left!” There were black cattle everywhere and he was so excited. Everyone was laughing so much they were crying.’

Hughes was also schooling his teammates in his unique method of cattle mathematics.

‘On the sidelines at the cricket,’ Steve O’Keefe says, ‘he would measure money by cows. If it was a match payment of, say, $10,000 from Cricket Australia he’d say, “That’s two cows, eh?”’ When the NSW players were working out their individual shares of prize money from a Champions League, Hughes looked at Trent Copeland and said, ‘That’s got to be four cows, doesn’t it?’ Copeland didn’t quite know how to reply.

Justin Langer loved it. ‘Everyone else was talking about Mercedes Benzes and diamond earrings and shaving their legs. He was talking about cows, that’s what made him so likable. He wanted to make a lot of runs so he could buy cows and retire on the farm.’

Soon Hughes would take steps to bring that dream to fruition.