After the difficulties of 2010, the next year was turning into the one in which Phillip Hughes would make his big move. The stars were in alignment. Clarke had succeeded Ponting as captain after Australia’s quarter-final exit from the World Cup, and a review into the game chaired by former banker Don Argus had recommended that the captain and coach become members of the national selection panel. With two panel members, Chappell and Clarke, as firm supporters, Hughes finally felt confident that he would be given a decent run in the Test team and press his claims for the short formats.
WHEN HE WAS PICKED for the August–September Sri Lankan tour, though, the moment was bittersweet. Hughes, along with Khawaja and West Australian Shaun Marsh, were chosen in a clear sign of generational change, but Katich, 36, had been sacrificed.
Justin Langer, as full-time Australian batting coach, did not take a firm hand in advising Hughes on his batting technique, reasoning that if the young man had already scored 16 first-class centuries, he must be doing something right. But Hughes wanted some fine-tuning, so he called Neil D’Costa before the tour and asked him to come to Australia for some work. For two weeks in the nets, the reunited pair worked on specific points that would soon bear fruit.
‘Those two weeks with Neil had a profound effect on Phillip, and I sensed he had unlocked a few of the problems that were worrying him,’ Henderson says.
His relationship with Langer was on a different plane. In Colombo, where the tourists arrived to prepare for a lead-up game at the P Sara Ground, the temperature was 42 degrees and the humidity 98 per cent when the Australians put in what Langer decided was a substandard fielding practice.
‘It was so hot, it was hell, I had tingles all along my body,’ Khawaja says.
At the end of the session, Langer called Hughes and Khawaja over.
‘You boys want to score a hundred runs every time you bat?’ Langer said. ‘I want you to visualise it.’
Khawaja thought, ‘I can visualise it back at the hotel.’
Then Langer started running up the wicket, and called for Hughes and Khawaja to follow. He ran a single, then a two, then a three, and then a four. Then he ran a four, a three, a two and a one.
Khawaja says, ‘I was nowhere, it was so hard.’
At that point, Langer said, ‘We’re a quarter of the way through. We’ve got three-quarters to go.’
There is rarely just one version of a Phillip Hughes story, and here the recollections of Khawaja and Langer diverge. All Khawaja can remember is Langer driving them on in the heat, so that, at the end of the session, Hughes and Khawaja were ‘lying on the changing room floor in our undies. I said, “Have you ever done anything as tough as that?” Phil said, “No way.” I said, “What’s he doing?” Phil said, “He’s just trying to break us. Don’t let him break you.” He was so strong and serious about his cricket in that way.’
Langer recalls the second part of the session slightly differently. After the running, Langer says he saw that Khawaja was ‘cooked’, but it was Hughes who said to Langer, ‘Come on, mate.’
‘What?’ Langer recalls saying.
‘Come on, mate, let’s go again.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘No, let’s do it again, you won’t break me, you have no chance of breaking me. Let’s do another hundred.’
Whatever the version of the story, the moral is the same: Hughes was willing to go through every imaginable pain barrier to succeed for Australia.
Trent Copeland had been picked on the tour for his Australian debut after two outstanding seasons for NSW, and Hughes was among the first to get in touch to congratulate him and the most eager to make him feel part of the squad. Copeland took five for 47 in the first innings of the lead-up match, sealing a Test debut at Galle the following week.
In the practice match, Hughes went out to open the innings with Khawaja. In the third over, the fast–medium right-armer Dhammika Prasad dug the ball in short. Hughes ducked, but was hit very hard in the grille at the side of his helmet. Khawaja hastened down the pitch. Hughes had his helmet off and asked Khawaja if there was a mark on his head.
Khawaja looked at Hughes’s head, near his ear, and saw a large lump swelling up.
‘No, you’re fine,’ Khawaja said.
‘Don’t lie to me,’ Hughes replied.
Knowing how much Hughes wanted to bat and make runs, and having witnessed his determination in training, Khawaja said nothing. They put on 153. Khawaja made a century and Hughes 76, passing the 5000-run mark in first-class cricket three months before his 23rd birthday.
The Test series would be a tour de force for Hussey, who was man of the match in all three games. Australia won in Galle and drew in Pallekele, but Hughes was again frustratedly unable to turn his starts into scores. When he made a duck in the first innings of the third Test match in Colombo, sections of the media were asking whether he would keep his place for Australia’s next tour to South Africa for two Tests a month later. Marsh had made a century on debut, Watson was solid, and Khawaja had unluckily but temporarily lost his place through injury. There was little room at the top of the order.
Hughes responded. Australia were trailing by 157 runs on the first innings after an Angelo Mathews century, and nearly two days remained when Hughes and Watson walked onto the sweltering Sinhalese Sports Club ground. The left-arm spinner Rangana Herath came on early and trapped Watson lbw. Hughes batted with a grim, almost ferocious stubbornness. He lost Marsh and Ponting, but urged Clarke to stay with him until the end of the day. When he reached his third Test century, he performed the time-honoured ritual of giving the media box a defiant fist-pump. After five hours of batting he came off, having steadied Australia and taken them to a 52-run lead. Safety was in sight.
‘That knock in Sri Lanka I remember very clearly,’ says Hussey, who replaced Hughes the next morning when he was dismissed for 126. ‘He was so determined and showed so much courage. It was a Justin Langer-type of innings. He might have felt it was his last chance, but he thought, “I’m going to take them on”. He went to slog-sweep the off-spinner, and I thought, “Oh no, that’s a low-percentage shot!” But he hit the ball out of the ground. It was one of those innings where I thought, “The selectors have to stick with him now”.’
Australia secured the draw, and Hughes had a ‘huge grin’ during the celebrations.
‘The pressure was off and he loved the team environment with the music blaring,’ Hussey says. ‘I remember his big beaming smile all night, he was so pumped about being back in the team.’
•
THE CHALLENGES KEPT COMING. As Nielsen had told him, Test cricket would be unrelenting and there was no such thing as security of tenure without consistent run-scoring to back it up. South Africa held fond memories for Hughes, but he was no longer the unchained spirit of 2009. He was a hardened young pro who gave up-yours to the press. He had undergone his share of suffering in those two-and-a-half years. And this time, Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel had made plans for him in advance that were more sophisticated than merely telling him he was no Matthew Hayden.
It was neither Steyn nor Morkel, however, who would give Hughes the most trouble. When it comes to bowlers, sometimes difficulty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Ever since Alec Bedser kept getting Arthur Morris out in the 1940s and 1950s, some bowlers have posed peculiar problems for some of the best batsmen. Glenn McGrath famously kept getting Mike Atherton and Brian Lara out, not just because he was the leading fast bowler of his time but because the idiosyncrasies of his action made their lives especially awkward.
Hughes had already encountered this with Andrew Flintoff, a bowler he found harder than any other. He was about to fall under a similar spell to two international bowlers, Vernon Philander and Chris Martin, and his failure to master them would cost him his Test place.
There was no disgrace in falling to Philander in late 2011. The Cape Town right-armer had risen steadily through the ranks and, at 26, was a fully mature exponent of fast-medium swing and seam. On his home wicket at Newlands, Philander had a dream debut, complementing Steyn and Morkel on the first day of the Test match to dismiss Australia for 284. Hughes nicked Philander on nine. Only Clarke prospered, playing arguably the best innings of his career to that point, a counter-punching 151 at nearly a run a ball.
The match took an extraordinary twist on the second day. It began with Australia batting in the first innings of the match and ended with South Africa well under way in the fourth. In between, 23 wickets fell. Ten South Africans went down for 96 and ten Australians for 47. Hughes’s nine was the top score until Peter Siddle and Nathan Lyon rallied for a last-wicket partnership of 26.
As the wicket settled, South Africa won by eight wickets. In Johannesburg, Australia rallied after Hughes and Watson led off their batting with 88 apiece. Hughes was at his audacious best, striking 14 boundaries in his 111 balls. Disappointingly, he fell short of a century when he edged a drive off Philander to first slip. But the partnership of 174 in 161 minutes was a turning point for Australia, reasserting their belief in positive batsmanship after such an eviscerating collapse in Cape Town.
In their second innings, Australia had to score 310 runs, more than any last-innings chase on South African soil, to preserve their record of not losing a Test series there since 1969–70. The pursuit started disastrously, with Watson out to the second ball and Hughes, after cracking two fours and rekindling memories of 2009, edging Philander to second slip. He had lost his wicket to Philander three times in four outings, not the only Australian to find that bowler a handful, but it left a sour taste. Khawaja and Ponting would mount the recovery effort before fighting contributions from Haddin, Johnson and debutant Pat Cummins saw Australia home to a mighty win.
New Zealand’s Chris Martin did not have a great deal in common with Philander, but he quickly became another bogeyman for Hughes. In truth, Hughes’s run of dismissals in South Africa and Australia did not have exotic causes. Accurate, full-pitched bowling at middle and off stumps in helpful conditions will account for most batsmen. Bowling attacks had often departed from the fundamentals to counter Hughes. Martin, like Philander, discovered that the most dangerous plan was the most basic.
Batting on early-season wickets was no fun for anyone. In Brisbane and Hobart in the two Trans-Tasman Test matches, the top three batsmen in both teams struggled. Until the last innings in Hobart, the average score for Australia’s top three (Hughes, Test debutant Warner and Khawaja) and New Zealand’s top three (Brendon McCullum, Martin Guptill and Kane Williamson/Jesse Ryder) was a combined 11.5 runs. Only once the shine left the ball were runs possible. For Hughes, it was the repetition of his dismissals that caused most concern. In all four of his innings against New Zealand, which totalled 41 runs, he was caught edging the gangling Martin to second-slip Guptill. When batsmen keep getting out the same way to the same bowler, it is widely taken to signify some technical flaw.
In Brisbane, where Warner failed alongside him, Hughes kept things light for his state teammate’s national debut. ‘He came up to me after my first innings and we had a laugh,’ Warner says. ‘We both said we didn’t think we could play those cover-drives we like with Martin bowling across us . . . He chuckled about those dismissals, he said, “Well, that’s cricket, we scored a lot of runs playing those shots and I’m not going to tuck them away”.’
Warner reversed the tide on the last day in Hobart, carrying his bat for a masterful unbeaten 123, but otherwise it was a dismal series for the men at the top. Hughes was out of form and had visible trouble with Martin, but he had scored 88 in Johannesburg two Tests earlier, and 126 in Colombo two Tests before that. When his omission came for the first of four home Test matches against India, it hit him with a hammer blow.
His place at the top of the order was taken by Cowan, who was making runs in irresistible volumes for Tasmania, while Khawaja was also axed for Shaun Marsh. Interestingly, Cowan, although he was the beneficiary, has reservations about Hughes’s omission.
‘Against New Zealand, it was just the one bowler,’ Cowan says. ‘If he’d played against India, he’d have scored a lot of runs, I’m sure.’
Rod Marsh, who had come onto the national selection panel after the South African tour, says the panel was in a bind over Hughes. ‘We always knew that . . . what he needed was a long run at Test cricket and he was going to be rewarded. But he had to get runs to stay in the side, and he didn’t get enough runs when he was in the side. It could be argued he didn’t get enough time.’
Hughes was forced to watch as Warner, Cowan, Ponting, Hussey and particularly Clarke – all of the Australian batsmen except Marsh – plundered a timid Indian bowling attack through December and January. He remained the consummate team man, not complaining publicly about his omission and stating that he accepted the need to score runs to get back in – but there was little cricket to be played before February, and his actions soon showed that he had taken this latest setback harder than the earlier ones.
Set against his entire career, to be in and out of the Australian team four times in two years could have been psychologically crippling. He had only known success; the worst thing that had happened to him was being picked in the NSW Under-17s instead of the Under-19s. Since he was a child, he had been told that his cricketing home was the Australian team. He believed that, and at the age of 20 he had proved that.
But those two hard years had recast him as a ‘fringe’ player, a battler who could not quite hold his place. It was a tough hand to be dealt, and it challenged his fundamental sense of who he was.
His mate Matthew Wade, who was now the Australian wicketkeeper, says, ‘We spent hours and hours talking about it. I just felt sorry for him, and also Steve Smith at the time. They got scrutinised like no-one who had ever played the game.’
For Hughes, cricket was the reliable cure for many of his woes. But there would be no first-class games for two months. He had signed with the Sydney Thunder in the new city-based Twenty20 Big Bash League, but after being dropped by Australia, he stood down.
‘Following my performances over the last few months,’ he said in a prepared statement, ‘I have decided that, right now, I need to be completely focused on my first-class cricket career. I’m obviously disappointed that I haven’t been able to score the runs in the last few Tests that I know I am capable of and I want to do everything I can to ensure that my game continues to develop.’
This was an easy decision, as the shorter form of the game was not going to help his drive to return to the Test team. It also gave him a break to go home and spend time with his family.
‘Every time Phillip went home to Macksville, he returned a different person,’ Henderson says. ‘I sensed this trip was one of the most important trips home that he would ever make, as he needed to clear his head, go back to the real core values in his life and come back ready to do everything possible to play his best cricket.’
He was considering big career decisions, including the possibility of leaving NSW. His home state had made changes to its coaching set-up. Former Australian one-day international bowler Anthony Stuart became head coach when Mott left for an English county contract, and Sri Lanka’s Chandika Hathurusingha took up the role of batting coach. Hughes had difficulty communicating with both, and felt that the state was not helping him with his overriding aim, which was to get back into the Australian team.
‘I knew he was frustrated and needed a new challenge,’ Mott says, ‘but he was quite a private guy and wouldn’t be harsh on individuals, so you couldn’t sense how deep the frustration was.’
Hughes’s ever-happy face in the NSW squad would have its flipside. His frustrations ran deep, but he did not let it show, and when he finally did, it caught his state by surprise.
Relations with NSW were already fractious. On his return from South Africa the previous November, Hughes had obeyed a Cricket Australia rule prohibiting cricketers from playing within 48 hours of long plane trips. This meant he missed an exhibition match at Hurstville Oval that had been heavily promoted with his name and image. Even though he was following the rules, his withdrawal from the match dismayed NSW officials. Dave O’Neil, his club president at Wests, says the state hierarchy ‘never forgave him’.
Hughes was also less than content at Wests. Many of his friends had gone: Daniel Smith for a better deal at the Sydney Cricket Club, while Steve Phillips had moved to Newcastle. Matt Day had spent the last three summers in Tasmania, and when he returned to Sydney in early 2012, he decided to go back not to Wests but to Mosman.
Jason Hughes also began talking to Mosman about transferring. Phillip told Wests he was thinking of leaving.
‘He wasn’t upset with Wests,’ Jason says, ‘but he just thought he wanted to try a new club.’
When Michael Clarke heard this, his response was firm.
‘He knew how angry I would have been if he had left Western Suburbs,’ Clarke says. ‘I made it very clear to him. He might have had concerns with NSW, but we were Western Suburbs players and loyalty was extremely important to me.’
Tangled in conflicting emotions, Hughes found it hard to get motivated. Jason says his younger brother often didn’t want to play club games during his break from first-class cricket. But with Jason, he had one last hurrah with Wests that season. Playing Mosman at Pratten Park, the brothers put on a memorable double-century stand, to which Jason contributed a half-century.
‘Even to me, he didn’t say much when we were batting,’ Jason says. ‘He was in his own world. He just said, “Take singles”. He only wanted me to give him the strike, and he was hitting them everywhere. All I could think of to say back to him was, “Don’t get out”. He was a Test cricketer. What else could I say?’
When Wests bowled, as captain Hughes had the team he wanted, with two pacemen and Jason as the third bowler. He said to his brother, ‘I want you to bowl ten [overs] straight.’
‘I thought it was crazy,’ Jason says. ‘I never bowled ten straight. But I took five for 25 and it was the best day with the ball I ever had.’
The club captaincy was significant. Hughes wanted to be captain whenever he played for Wests, and wanted to be taken more seriously as a leadership contender at higher levels of the game. This surprised some, but his leadership qualities and ambitions were evident to those who had watched him closely.
For on-field tactical acumen, he had often proved his touch, most recently in a club Twenty20 final against Fairfield. Captain that day, Hughes batted deep into Wests’ chase and hit the last ball for four to tie the game. This meant there would be a ‘super over’, and to universal surprise Hughes threw the ball to Andrew ‘Flash’ Gordon, a medium-pacer who did not play regular first-grade. But Gordon had Twenty20 experience from the Indigenous competition, the Imparja Cup. Hughes saw something in him that was not apparent to others. In Gordon’s over, Fairfield’s main batsman, Ben Rohrer, hit a catch to Hughes at mid-wicket. Gordon took another wicket, and Fairfield managed only three runs, which Wests eclipsed easily. Hughes’s decision was, says David O’Neil, ‘a masterstroke’.
Hughes saw himself as a future Australian leader. He often discussed with Clarke the finer points of captaincy and leadership around the team. Hughes had also grown close to Ponting, mostly during the two years Ponting continued in the Australian team as a batsman under Clarke and since Henderson started managing him. Ponting was regularly on the receiving end of a Hughes text: ‘coffee bruz?’
From their conversations about cricket, leadership and life, Ponting’s respect for Hughes grew. ‘He just blew me away how he kept working harder and harder every time he lost his place in the Australian team,’ Ponting says. ‘And he kept coming back – with even more domestic runs under his belt. It annoys me just how unlucky he was not to have played more international cricket.’
Hughes’s captaincy potential was soon to be recognised outside NSW. His relationship with his home state, however, was about to implode.
•
WHENEVER HE WAS DISENCHANTED with cricket, Hughes found an outlet in his other passions: family, friends and cows.
‘You could tell when he was struggling,’ Daniel Smith says, ‘because he’d get up and fly home for a couple of days. When he had to go, he had to go. He needed to talk with his mum and dad and get away from the bright lights. It usually did the trick.’
Some of these trips home left his close friends with their happiest memories. Matt Day recalls Hughes’s response to being left out of a cricket tour by the Australian selectors.
‘He was shattered, but he said, “We’ll have a good weekend anyway”.’
Cattle was often the focus of these trips up north, and Hughes invited Lloyd Andrews and Ash Squire to the Macksville Show.
‘Everything about him was relaxed,’ Andrews says, ‘but when it came to cricket and his cows he was like, “Game on”. That Macksville Show, he and his family treated me and Ash like kings. Vin [Virginia] was, “Here’s the fridge, here’s the toilet, make yourselves at home, and let me know when you want me to pick you up at the pub”. They were the family any kids would want. He got up at 4.30 in the morning for the show. We woke up and said, “Where is he?” He’d left his mum to take us to the show, and she did.’
The show, says Andrews, gave them a new insight into Hughes’s approach to cattle.
‘He had that look: “I’m going to win best cow”. He was going to get it to stand just right, he was going to fix that one hair on its back that was out of place.’
An important part of many of Phillip’s close relationships was that they did not talk about cricket, Andrews says.
Pleased as punch, Hughes collects the spoils from the Kempsey Show with prize-winning Angus cow ‘Vicky’ in 2014. He and his cows won ‘Supreme Beef Animal’ three years straight.
‘We talked cows – not that I knew what he was talking about – rugby league, and a lot about girls.’
Hughes attended the Andrews’ wedding in Balmain. ‘It was booked months in advance,’ Andrews says, ‘but he kept asking, “When is it? When is it?” There was all this suspense about is he going to be there, or is he going to be away playing cricket? Three days prior, he rang and said, “What do I wear?” He was always asking what he should be wearing.’
After the wedding, Hughes got back to the hotel in Drummoyne where he was staying with Day and his girlfriend in the early hours of the morning. Deciding he was hungry, he noticed a light on in a pie shop next door.
‘He knocked and knocked until they let him in,’ Day says. ‘The next thing you know, he’s sitting on a milk crate eating a pie, with a bag of sausage rolls to bring back to us. That was him through and through.’
During the time he was feeling most disillusioned with NSW in the summer of 2011–12, his surrogate family gave him one of his greatest thrills.
‘Kat was pregnant that year,’ Andrews says, ‘and for the whole nine months he kept asking, “When’s it coming?” I’d say, “I told you! It’s nine months!” He was there the day Jackson was born. It was the best day.’
Hughes became unofficial godfather to little Jackson Andrews.
‘He was always on the phone asking me to send photos. “What’s he doing? Look how big he is. Is he running?” He was really the best . . . I’m always going to make sure Jackson knows who he was.’
•
NSW’S SEASON RESUMED IN the first week of February 2012 with one-day and Sheffield Shield matches against Tasmania at Bellerive.
‘Phil and I were both in a bad place, which is where you are when you’re dropped by Australia,’ says Khawaja. ‘But we would expect to slot straight back into the domestic team.’ Indeed, in their only match so far in that season’s 50-over Ryobi Cup, Khawaja (116) and Hughes (96) had put on a record 212 for the first wicket against South Australia.
Khawaja continues, ‘Just before play commenced in the Shield match [chairman of selectors] David Freedman said to Phil, “Sorry, you’re not opening, Moisés [Henriques] is opening instead”. It was a really bizarre decision.’
Henriques was out on the first ball of the match.
One NSW player feeling distinctly uncomfortable was Nic Maddinson. The 20-year-old South Coast left-hander had effectively taken the place of a mentor. ‘I was in a strange situation, being the batter coming in when he was dropped,’ Maddinson says.
Maddinson had become Hughes’s regular roommate after Forrest left for Queensland and a finger injury put Daniel Smith out of the NSW team.
‘He always called me “youngster”, and he seemed like he’d played as much as the 30-year-olds, even though he was only two years older than me,’ Maddinson says.
In an Adelaide Sheffield Shield match, Hughes helped Maddinson to an early success as his opening partner. As Maddinson loosened up in his innings, Hughes marched down the wicket and said, ‘Come on, youngster, this is Shield cricket. This is the best chance you’re going to get, so stop stuffing around, make sure you’re still batting with me at the end of the day.’
‘He was the hungriest player for runs. That’s what I learned from him,’ Maddinson says. So to be in the NSW team when Hughes was out was awkward. ‘It was a strange dynamic, though I don’t think he held it against me personally.’
He did not, but he did hold it against the NSW selectors. When Hughes rang Greg for his customary daily chat, he said his first reaction was that Freedman was ‘taking the mickey’, but once he realised the selectors were serious he said, ‘That’s OK, I can get a game somewhere else.’
Hughes had been courted by other states already. Darren Lehmann had approached Henderson on behalf of the Brisbane Heat Twenty20 franchise, which he coached, before Hughes pulled out of the BBL. South Australia had shown interest, and players from Tasmania and Victoria had sounded Hughes out about a switch when they heard he was disenchanted with NSW. Henderson was particularly enthusiastic about the interest being shown by South Australia, and accelerated those discussions.
Word got back to the Cricket NSW chief executive, Dave Gilbert, who asked Hughes about his intentions. Hughes told Gilbert and the team that he just wanted to concentrate on a good finish to the season. In the final four Sheffield Shield matches, his form was patchy in a team that finished one place from the bottom of the table, although he scored an unbeaten 58 against Western Australia in the Ryobi Cup after he was reinstated.
By now Henderson had negotiated the framework of a deal that would see Hughes move to Adelaide to play for the South Australian Redbacks and the Adelaide Strikers. It was a compelling three-year deal that would deliver Hughes continuous cricket across the first-class, 50-over and Twenty20 formats. The Adelaide Oval had always suited Hughes’s strengths square of the wicket, and he would be in a leadership role in all three teams. The slower-paced city of Adelaide would also sit well with Hughes’s lifestyle and his training ethic.
Hughes went to Macksville, spent time with his family and considered his options.
Clarke contacted him and said, ‘If you’re not sure what to do, don’t make a decision. But if you’re certain, I’ll back your judgement.’
Clarke says now, ‘I was determined that if he was staying in Sydney, he should stay with Western Suburbs. But if he wasn’t going to stay with NSW, that was his decision to make.’
South Australia’s two top cricket administrators were state talent manager Tim Nielsen and manager of high performance, Jamie Cox.
‘I knew how good a player he was and he was a bit on the outer,’ says Nielsen. ‘He was a pretty obvious choice.’
It so happened that as Australian team coach and national selector on duty respectively, Nielsen and Cox had been involved in that major turning point of Hughes’s career, his omission during the 2009 Ashes tour. But, of his many admired qualities, one was that Hughes did not harbour grudges.
‘I’d taken the time to talk to him when I saw him around the traps,’ Cox says, ‘and he was always so well prepared for his cricket, just a hard worker in the Justin Langer mould. It was during those years that I saw him as a guy who could bring back the level of preparation he’d seen through spending time with Ponting, Hussey, Clarke, those sorts of players, to South Australia where we had a void in that kind of leadership. His cricket by this stage looked like it needed a fresh start.’
Things moved quickly. Cox flew to Sydney with South Australia’s coach, the former Victorian wicketkeeper Darren Berry, and met with Hughes at a hotel near Sydney Airport.
Berry, who was meeting Hughes for the first time, recalls, ‘We had scoured a list of good names to recruit. We needed a player who was young, aspirational, who could be a leader in our group. We settled on Phillip, and within 15 minutes of meeting him I knew we couldn’t leave until we had his signature. He had strong direction and purpose for a guy who was so young, and I saw a lot of similarities between us: country upbringing, love of family, steely resolve under a joking nature. And he was so respectful of others. It all came across in how he talked about what he wanted to do.’
Cox says, ‘We sold it to him as an opportunity. He might benefit from having a new group to impress. It was, “You help us, we’ll help you.”’ Cox came out of the meeting very excited, thinking, ‘This might happen!’
Hughes’s last performance for NSW was to score 22 and 0 in a defeat to Victoria at the MCG, the end of a poor 2011–12 season for both team and individual. His departure would have ramifications for Khawaja, who also left to pursue his future with Queensland, following Peter Forrest.
‘That decision to drop him in Tasmania was massive for me,’ Khawaja says. ‘If they could do that to Hughesy, what was stopping them doing it to me? It took me a little while, but I came to the same decision.’
Ben Rohrer, who remained at NSW as one of its senior players, says, ‘A lot of things fractured during that season, but I don’t understand why we didn’t do everything we could to keep Phil and Usman. Why wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to keep them? We were told Phil was staying, and then we couldn’t believe when he went to South Australia. But he thought it was the best thing for his cricket. It was a huge loss to us, for what he brought us on and off the field. We missed his personality.’
For Daniel Smith, who had lost his Sheffield Shield place to Peter Nevill but continued to play short-form representative cricket, Hughes’s departure still rankles.
‘He left for personal reasons and he had to go, because staying wouldn’t have helped him get back into the Test team. I was sad as a mate, and I’m still a little bit dirty about it. He didn’t have a choice because of how he was dealt with. Leaving him out of the one-day team was ludicrous in my opinion. He should have been a New South Welshman forever and a day.’
Henderson believed that out of this disappointment, a new beginning was awaiting Hughes in Adelaide. He had also negotiated a 2012 county season deal with Worcestershire. For the first time since his international debut in March 2009, Hughes would have the opportunity to play a full uninterrupted season of all three forms of cricket.