Stubborn, determined, still sublimely gifted, but now, in what would turn out to be the last chapter of his career, Phillip Hughes had a hard shell. His rejection in England still did not make sense to him, and over the next summer he was forced to be a spectator as Australia reclaimed the Ashes with a spectacular 5–0 whitewash, led by Mitchell Johnson in his comeback, supposedly a confirmation of the benefits of tough love from the selectors.
FOR HUGHES, THERE WAS no way back, only forward. He toured India with the Australian one-day team in the spring, making consistent starts but only one half-century. His 199 runs at 33.16 were a fair return, but he could also feel his World Cup dream slipping.
He was inseparable from his opening partner Aaron Finch. ‘The boys took the piss out of us,’ Finch says, ‘because if we weren’t both on the field, that was the only time we weren’t together. He’d knock on my door at 9 am and say, “Let’s go for coffee.” If I wasn’t ready, he’d sit in the corner waiting. Then when I was ready, he’d say, “Nah, I’m going to call Greg.” He spoke to his mum and dad four, five times a day, even from India.’
During the series, Hughes renewed his bantering friendship with his one-time underage opponent, Virat Kohli. In Jaipur, where India were chasing 360 to win, Hughes walked up to Kohli, who came in at one for 176 in the 27th over, and said, ‘Are you finding the target too tough? Lot of pressure!’
Kohli replied, ‘I’ve been in these situations many times.’
Hughes had a laugh, but Kohli laughed last, steering India to an incredible win in the 44th over after scoring 100 not out off 52 balls. In the change rooms, Hughes found Kohli and said, ‘I really like your stick! I like the way it sounds. Can I have one?’
In another game, Kohli laughs, Hughes pointed out that they were wearing the same brand of sunglasses.
‘You’re following me!’ Hughes said to the superstar. ‘I’m setting the trend!’
Kohli, who had a fractious relationship with some of the Australians, found that he liked Hughes greatly. ‘He would have a pleasant chat during the game, he would come and talk about anything and always had that nice smile. He was pretty excited to be where he was, playing for Australia, you could see that. He was happy to be on the pitch and to be interacting with people that he liked. I never found him as someone who was hostile. He was calm and quiet and friendly. He seemed happy to be doing what he was doing.’
•
IN HIS SECOND SHEFFIELD Shield season for South Australia, Hughes made three 100s and averaged 54.27 in another summer of machine-like run-making. He knew he had a staunch supporter in coach Darren Berry, who had publicly criticised the Australian selectors for not selecting Hughes as a top-three batsman in England.
When Hughes returned to Adelaide, he simply said, ‘I can’t work it out.’
‘That’s all he said to me about being dropped,’ Berry says. ‘Then he went and hit a truckload of balls in practice. He said, “I’ve got to get better”. His attitude when he came back to us was just to pump out runs. I have never seen him not on.’
A double-century, against Western Australia at the Adelaide Oval, was the punchline to an ongoing contest with his flatmate, Tom Cooper.
Ever since Hughes had fallen twice in the 190s on the Adelaide Oval, Cooper had been teasing him for not, like himself, having a first-class double-hundred.
‘My first hundred was 203 not out,’ Cooper says. ‘He would talk about two-hundreds and I would give him shit all the time, “They aren’t that hard, mate. You’ve scored 23 or 24 hundreds and you can’t get one two-hundred. I did it in my first go”. He used to hate it. He would say, “I have more hundreds now than you will get in your whole career, blah blah blah.”’
That day, says Nathan Coulter-Nile, who was bowling for the Warriors, ‘He was just too good. He always seemed to make runs when I was bowling. I did run him out, though. As he went off, I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’ve just had enough”.’
When Hughes came into the changing room, run out for 204, Berry was blowing up about the dismissal. Hughes simply grinned at Cooper and said, ‘Gotcha, bruz.’
Hughes had scored his hundredth and two-hundredth runs off Ashton Agar, who was also battling with his time in the so-called wilderness.
‘In the dressing room later, I sat with him and we chatted,’ Agar says. ‘I’d been searching for more consistency as a bowler. He said it was getting better that day. “You didn’t bowl many bad balls at me, you’ve got really consistent”. He was a mentor to me, strange to say, because he was often the young guy.’
At the MCG in the next Shield game, Hughes scored another century, 103 in the first innings against Victoria. It was his 25th birthday; Henderson and his DSEG offsider Richard King gave a special birthday cheer from the MCG Members. After a dubious lbw decision, Hughes joined Henderson and King for a chat. Soon a large family contingent came down. It turned out that a young cricket fan was celebrating his 10th birthday on the same day, and had asked for a day at the MCG to celebrate. ‘Hughesy spent a good 15 minutes talking to the birthday boy and his family,’ Henderson remembers. ‘This is the best birthday present I could ever have hoped for,’ the little boy said as Hughes signed his cricket bat before heading back to his South Australian teammates.
Another fortnight later, Hughes returned to the SCG as a South Australian for the first time, and reeled off another hundred. Some of his former teammates dreaded playing against him, not just because he was sure to punish them with his bat. The night before the match, he ran into Nic Maddinson and promised him, ‘I’m going to make a hundred.’
And that was what he did.
‘You could tell from the first ball, that’s what he was going to do,’ Maddinson says.
His 118 set up an outright win for South Australia, putting them on top of the Shield table.
‘It was a shithouse, cracked wicket,’ Darren Berry says. ‘I kept saying to the younger players, “Watch Hughesy”. It was a tough, scrapping hundred.’
Berry says it was a case of mixed feelings for Hughes, who ‘loved his old teammates’.
‘Playing against him was terrible,’ says Ben Rohrer, one of the NSW team in that match. ‘Our plan was to rough him up early. Why did we bother? Everyone targeted him, but he knew how to get out of the way and then when we went wide he’d crunch them. We actually bowled quite well, but he was too good.’
As far as verbal byplay was concerned, Rohrer says, ‘It was actually quite fun because you could have a little joke with him. But we could deal without the hundred he scored every time. He was never bitter towards the NSW players. I think he loved us, and we definitely all loved him.’
Hughes was able to bring his sense of perspective and lightness to his South Australian teammates, too. Playing NSW, tail-ender Gary Putland came to the wicket, very nervous. Hughes said, ‘What’s the matter, mate?’
‘I’m a bit worried,’ Putland said.
‘How’s your mum?’
‘All right.’
‘How’s your dad?’
‘All right.’
‘How’s your animals?’
‘All right.’
‘What’s to worry about, then?’
Visits to Sydney also brought Hughes into contact with his old friends. He might only have an hour free, but he would be on the phone to one of his mates to meet him for a coffee.
‘He had a way of making people come and spend time with him,’ Matt Day says. Lloyd Andrews was often inveigled into lunch or coffee, while Daniel Smith was sometimes playing against him anyway, as a member of the Sydney Sixers Twenty20 outfit.
‘Playing against him was definitely different,’ Smith says. ‘It was hard. I wanted him to come out and score 100 off 40 balls. I shouldn’t say it, but I always wanted him to do well.’
When the Sixers played in Adelaide in January 2014, Smith checked into his hotel and found Hughes in his room.
‘How did you get in?’
‘I just told them I was part of the cricket team,’ smiled Hughes, who had been in Smith’s room for an hour and a half.
There was a wider consensus that Hughes was benefiting from his move to Adelaide, and was using the change in lifestyle to build a launchpad for a new tilt at the Australian team in all three formats. Ponting says it was ‘no surprise to me that he really settled down in Adelaide and Worcester, two cities that probably had a better pace of life for Hughesy so he could concentrate on becoming an even better cricketer’.
Greg Chappell agrees. ‘Going to Adelaide was a really good move. It got him out of an environment he was used to. He worked hard, he was well liked, and he led.’
David O’Neil, from the Wests club, who stayed in contact with Hughes, says, ‘Phil was a lot happier once he had left the things that were bothering him in NSW, and his leadership qualities were developing.’
Manager Henderson says, ‘This was the best decision we could have made for Phillip’s career aspirations.’
As Hughes had hoped, his leadership was appreciated at every level in the South Australian team, from young players like leg-spinner Adam Zampa, who had also moved from NSW, and left-hand batsman Travis Head, to more seasoned contemporaries such as Tom Cooper and Tim Ludeman.
‘We’d have coffees and he helped me by talking about our outside lives,’ Ludeman says. ‘I was very cricket focused, and Phil made me remember how important family is.’
Berry, who maintained his brotherly relationship with Hughes, was offering two pathways. One was a team set-up where he could bat the way he wanted and get back into the Australian side, or, Berry says, ‘if that didn’t go to plan, we were looking for someone to take over from Johan Botha as captain. People were definitely drawn to Phil as a leader.’
South Australia gave him a rest in the second half of a busy season, allowing him to go home to his safety net, his Four 0 Eight Angus cattle stud outside Macksville that he had bought before leaving NSW.
‘When I retire,’ he told Lloyd Andrews, ‘I’m getting right away from cricket.’
Cooper says, ‘He got put in his contract that if he ever got homesick and there was no cricket, he could go home . . . so he could see his cows. Then I’d get a stream of pictures on my phone of him with cows and tractors and bloody fence posts and all this stuff.’
Being a cattleman was no pie in the sky for Hughes. In 2010, at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, he had met Corey Ireland, owner of Irelands Angus, a breeding operation at Wagga Wagga.
‘I had a heifer he wanted to buy, and I wasn’t a cricket follower so I didn’t know who he was,’ Ireland recalls. ‘Greg was very reserved, but Hughesy was excited and passionate and asking a lot of questions. There was a big crowd of people standing around. I thought it was for my animals!’
At that stage, Greg was helping Phillip run a handful of cattle on a small property outside Macksville. Ireland told them they were welcome to come and visit his farm, and they went down within weeks. A friendship and a mentorship quickly developed, and Ireland saw that Phillip had not just the enthusiasm but the eye.
‘You meet a lot of people who come into the business but really, it’s a thing you’ve either got or you haven’t. Hughesy had it. He could walk into a paddock and pick out his top two cows, and he would be spot-on.’
In the intervening years, the Hugheses bought a larger property outside Macksville which they called the Angus Four 0 Eight Stud. By 2014, it was up to some 50 head of cattle, but the ambition was to have a herd of 500 to 600.
‘Through the years, as he matured as a person, he decided he wasn’t into fancy cars, he just wanted to do this so badly,’ Ireland says. ‘He did things carefully, not just coming in with a big wad of cash and going bang-bang-bang. Everything he did was well-planned and patient, built from the ground up.’
By 2014, Ireland was having almost daily telephone conversations with Hughes and receiving him for visits. ‘He was a huge part of our family. He wanted to pick up the kids from the school bus and spend an hour with them playing cricket or riding around. It was pretty special, and he loved it. He could be himself and relax. Then we’d sit up all night talking about cows. He knew exactly what he wanted to do in his life after cricket, and he was using it to motivate himself in cricket. He’d say, “If I make a hundred here, I’m going to buy a cow”.’
Within the cricket world, teammates looked on Hughes’s passion for cattle not as an amusing hobby anymore, but something to be envied. Shane Watson says that he and his wife, Lee, ‘saw up close how infatuated he was with his cattle. I knew he loved it, but it wasn’t until he started talking to me and all the detail and the passion he had for every animal he owned, for the business, for all that stuff. When I listened to him I would think, “This guy is set and he knows everything about it, he has a passion.” . . . It was almost an equal passion [with cricket]. That is totally rare – I don’t think I have seen anyone in his generation who had their options sorted out like that. The rest of us put all our energy into cricket and that’s all we have had.’
•
HUGHES’S IMMEDIATE PRIORITY REMAINED a push for Australian selection. But the 2013–14 summer ended with a setback, when the Australian selectors chose Shaun Marsh and Tasmania’s Alex Doolan ahead of him for the three-Test tour of South Africa to vie for the batting vacancy created by the axing of George Bailey after the Ashes.
Jamie Cox says Hughes was ‘really upset’ at not being chosen, particularly because he had ‘received information prior to the announcement that he was going’.
Hughes was eventually taken on the tour as a reserve batsman, but did not play a game. Rather than dwell on his disappointment, he took it as another challenge. Rod Marsh was impressed.
‘He said to me, which I thought was amazing, when he had the option of coming home and playing the last Shield game, that he’d rather be around the boys,’ Marsh says. ‘He wanted to do whatever he could to help them win the series. He could have gone home and made runs and staked his claim higher, but he preferred to stay in South Africa with the lads. I thought that was tremendous.’
Marsh says that in conversations over why he had been omitted or overlooked, Hughes was clear-eyed and determined. ‘He would always listen, he would always understand, he would always try and improve. If you had to drop him, he would look at you and his eyes would demand you had to tell him what he had to do to get back in the side. There was never an acceptance that he wouldn’t be back.’
During the winter of 2014, Cricket Australia staged a six-week tournament of one- and four-day games involving A teams from Australia, India and South Africa, as well as a side made up of emerging Australian players, in Brisbane, Darwin and Townsville.
The series brought Hughes together with some of his closest friends in cricket, including Tom Cooper, Matthew Wade and Peter Forrest. He needed their support. His grandfather Sidney, Greg’s father, passed away that month, and he would not be chosen for the upcoming Australian one-day tour of Zimbabwe, which indicated that he was not at the front of the selectors’ World Cup plans.
‘It was the worst I’d seen him, selection-wise,’ Wade says. ‘I had never seen him so angry.’
The pair had dinner regularly during the series. Some nights, Hughes was upbeat, ‘fully kitted up, the clothes and the shoes and the hair’, Wade says, but other nights he was flat, almost depressed, ‘wearing the worst track pants and slippers. He just wanted to get back to his room with his iPad Mini to look at pictures of his cows’.
Wade, also on the outer with the Australian selectors, ‘could have the conversations with him that he couldn’t have with other people. It was a nice thing to be there for him when he was like that. He hadn’t done much wrong, which was the hardest thing. We had hours and hours of talking about getting dropped. I just said, “We’ve all been there, you’re going to get another opportunity”.’
Hughes also built a strong friendship with Doolan, with whom he had first roomed during an Australia A match in Sydney in late 2012. He roomed with Doolan again during the A series. ‘We clicked from the start,’ Doolan says. ‘He described us both as “chillers”. We were similar in that we liked to chill out and not get caught up in the hype. Our only difference was that he hated movies, and I loved them, but if we had the TV on it had to be sport.’ Doolan also says Hughes was ‘on the phone more than anyone I’ve known. He’d be talking to his family or his farmer mate Corey [Ireland]. I learned a lot more about cows than I ever wanted to.’
Doolan had sometimes been picked ahead of Hughes – for the South African tour in 2013–14, and on standby for the previous summer’s Sydney Test match – but while he himself thought, ‘If I’ve been picked, it means Phil Hughes has been stiffed,’ he says that Hughes was always supportive, never jealous. ‘Whenever I said to him that he should be in instead of me, he said, “Don’t be stupid.” If one of his mates was in the team, he was happy. I learned so much from him about how to deal with disappointment. Every time he got knocked down, he got up again.’
After a moderate start to the series in Brisbane, Hughes clicked in the second innings of a four-day match against India A.
‘They were quality international bowlers,’ Forrest recalls. ‘Watching Hughesy in the nets, he wasn’t dominant. It was no surprise when he missed out at first. Then he flicked the switch, two cover-drives in one over off [Umesh] Yadav. They set a field for bowling wide outside off-stump. He walked across and hit Yadav over mid-wicket. During the break, I said, “What are you doing?” He just said, “I’m on, bruz”.’
He was on. After an unbeaten century in that game, he took out his frustrations on the visitors when the series moved to Marrara Cricket Ground in Darwin for one-day matches. He scored two half-centuries against India A, and the night before a game against South Africa A he rang Matt Day.
‘I’m going to make a statement and show everyone,’ he said.
‘He really wanted to make the World Cup squad,’ Day says. ‘He had that uncanny knack of letting you know when he was going to do well. I don’t think he was more determined – he was always determined. But he just had a feeling for when he was going to do it.’
What followed was an astonishing batting blitz, 202 not out off 151 balls. It was the first double-century by an Australian in one-day cricket, passing Warner’s mark of 197.
‘His currency was runs,’ Forrest says, ‘and when he got into form, he never wasted it. In the mood he was in, hundreds weren’t big enough for him.’
Hughes dedicated the innings to his pa. ‘I wanted to make it a special day,’ he said, ‘and it was a special day.’
For its last stop, the northern tour would take in two four-day matches between Australia A and South Africa A at Tony Ireland Stadium in Townsville. Hughes did not convert starts in the first game, but in the second, he was in a grinding, ruthless frame of mind. He was named captain of Australia A for that final game.
‘Phillip saw this as a major milestone in his career,’ Henderson says. ‘He always had leadership aspirations and captaining Australia A gave him the chance to show what he had to offer but, more importantly, it was a recognition from the selectors that they were watching him very closely and his future was on the up.’
His tactical leadership was exceptional, says teammate O’Keefe.
‘I got two wickets, but Hughesy got both for me. I had a bloke at square leg and he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “What do you reckon we just bring him up here, eh? Let [Temba Bavuma, the batsman] have a hit if he wants to have a hit”. Next over, he brought him even further in and sure enough [Bavuma] tried to pull one because there was no one there. He just popped it up and was gone. At the end of the day, Hughesy played with fields, he put Matty Wade into bat-pad and had a leg slip on an absolute belter. One popped up and Wadey took a hanger.’
After the second day was lost to rain, the South Africans batted well into the third, ruining any chance of a result in the game.
Hughes’s men asked, ‘What are we going to do, Hughesy?’
‘Stuff ’em, we’re going to bat for two days. I’m just going to keep batting, eh?’
After the brutality of his double-century in Darwin, he produced a ten-hour marathon, wearing the South Africans away. He accumulated partnerships with Forrest, South Australian teammates Cooper and Callum Ferguson, and Wade.
‘He was dominant, ruthless, just better than them,’ Forrest says.
Matthew Mott, who was in Townsville in a coaching role, agrees. ‘He was too good for that level. He was so mature. South Africa had an off-spinner [Simon Harmer], and he didn’t try to take him on, he just played to get up the other end. He was saying to the selectors, “You’ve got to pick me”.’
Sending the national selectors a message was, says Cooper, ‘One hundred per cent why he got that double-hundred, it was a “I’ll show them” mentality. “If they are not going to pick me I am just going to go out and score two hundred.” It was like nothing else would matter, he had that knack where he could put everything else out of his mind and bat for 350 balls to get 100 or do it in 100 balls; it was unbelievable.’
Marsh, the chairman of selectors, took notice. ‘You hope they go out there and shove it right up you, and that’s what he did.’
Hughes had passed his 100 when Wade joined him at three for 333.
‘I was trying to get him through,’ Wade says. ‘I wanted him to get 200 and then 300. Just more and more and not stopping.’
Wade now has a tattoo of Hughes on his forearm, with the SCG clock set permanently at 4.08. ‘I didn’t want to forget. Julia sees his face and says, “Hugh-dog, stop looking at me!” They’re probably having conversations about stilettos.’
Hughes was 243 when he declared. The match was over, but he was ready to restart. News had come through that Shane Watson had injured his ankle, and Hughes would be on the plane to Zimbabwe.
•
DESPITE BEING A LATE replacement, Hughes’s World Cup dream remained a real possibility with two half-centuries in the triangular series with South Africa and Zimbabwe.
Cooper was out on a date when he got a call from Hughes. ‘Mate, I’ve been picked for the Pakistan tour but I’ve lost my passport and my cap’s in Sydney. I need help.’
Hughes had been picked for Australia’s tour of the United Arab Emirates for one-day and Test series against Pakistan. Cooper spent the next day driving him around Adelaide getting a passport and other details organised, while Megan flew from Sydney with his baggy green. ‘I flew to Sydney and went to Breakfast Point to get the cap out of his safe,’ Megan laughs. ‘Then I had to wait in Sydney for four or five hours because we didn’t know if he’d be in Adelaide or in Melbourne. At the last minute, he told me to get on a flight to Melbourne. I was so scared, carrying the cap around! Finally we met for ten minutes, I gave him his baggy green and a kiss and said good luck. He went off on his flight, and I flew back to Sydney. Most of our time at home was just chilling out, we were always relaxed at home, but this time I was freaking out!’
In the UAE, he had less success in the one-day matches when moved down the order, and he did not play in the Test matches. Nevertheless, his personality continued to brighten what turned into a difficult tour, with Australia soundly beaten by a Pakistan team enjoying the hot conditions. When his old NSW teammate Steve O’Keefe was selected for his Test debut, Hughes ‘was the first one to send me a message, the first one to shake my hand when I got the cap, and he was always the one who was there when things were happening, he’d be the one sitting next to you . . . When the shit hit the fan in the second Test and we had lost 2–0, he came up to me and said, “You reckon this is bad, eh? In India we lost 4–0. That’s twice as bad, eh!”’
Hughes spent much of his off-field time with Alex Doolan and Doolan’s wife, Laura. ‘We were eating together every day before she arrived,’ Doolan says. ‘He found a sushi train place that he kept wanting to go back to. I was feeling guilty that she was coming. But when she got there, her first question before dinner was, “What’s Hughesy doing?” I think she liked going out for dinner with him more than going with me. He’d talk away with her about anything, whether he knew what he was talking about or not. By the time we finished, I’d have a cramp in my cheeks from laughing and smiling so much.’
On the way back to Australia, Hughes had the chance to spend time with Rod Marsh, the only other Australian flying direct from Dubai to Adelaide. On their way to the airport, Marsh was trying to get an upgrade from business to first-class.
‘I’ve never flown first-class,’ Hughes said.
‘You never know,’ Marsh said, ‘sometimes you get one.’
When they checked in their bags at the airport, the attendant told Marsh he had been upgraded.
‘Has Mr Hughes been upgraded too?’ Marsh said.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact he has.’
Marsh says the look on Hughes’s face was ‘just excitement. We then went into the first-class lounge, had a sit-down meal, which was unbelievable, and then we got on the plane and we were on opposite sides of the aisle. You get a little cabin in first-class so you can close the door. I got myself organised and stood up and looked over to see where he was, and he had pulled himself up over the divider with that cheeky smile of his. He gave me the two thumbs up and I will never, ever forget that – his smile.’
Back at home, Hughes was straight into the Sheffield Shield, playing against NSW at the Adelaide Oval in the competition’s first-ever day–night match. He was out in both innings to a rampant Mitchell Starc, but his second-innings 69, when the next-highest score was 30, showed that he had adapted to the unfamiliar conditions more quickly than most. He missed out in the Redbacks’ next match against Victoria, but when the team travelled to Sydney he set himself for a big score.
Michael Clarke’s troublesome hamstring was likely to rule him out of the first Test match against India a week and a half later, and Hughes was widely tipped as the replacement. Virginia and Megan travelled down from Macksville for the game at the SCG starting on 25 November.
His mate Lloyd Andrews also felt it. ‘There was something in the air about that year that said, “Once he gets in the Test team this time, this will be it”.’
In the days before the match, Hughes was suffering from a virus. ‘He wasn’t well,’ Greg says, ‘but he was so determined to score runs. He’d thought he’d batted himself out of the Test team when he didn’t make runs in the previous match, but now it was clear that Clarkey was struggling with his hamstring, Phillip knew how important this match was, and he saw that bigger picture.’
After a hot Monday, the Tuesday dawned mild with high cloud: a perfect day for batting on a dry-looking SCG wicket. Johan Botha won the toss for South Australia and had no hesitation batting first. Hughes and Mark Cosgrove went out into the usual furnace of first-hour aggression, with Starc and especially Doug Bollinger peppering their bodies with accurate fast bowling. The NSW slips cordon, stacked with Australian Test representatives – Brad Haddin, Shane Watson, David Warner, Nathan Lyon – let the South Australians know they were in a match. Off-spinner Lyon and the fast-medium right-armer Sean Abbott came on to bowl, but Hughes and Cosgrove made it to the first drinks break.
Fielding in a helmet at bat-pad was Nic Maddinson, who recognised the same determination as the previous year, when Hughes had made a hundred against his old team. ‘A few guys had spoken to him before, and he’d pinpointed that game. All the big guns were playing for the Blues and he said he was going to score a hundred. We were never going to get him out.’
David Warner, fielding on the off-side, has no doubt a big score was coming. ‘You could see in his last innings the determination of the kid. He was making a statement. He was going to go big. He was sick the night before, he was sick that morning, but he had to play because there was a Test match around the corner.’
During the session, Darren Berry wandered up to the press box at the top of the new Bradman–Noble Stand, where he chatted with Test selector Mark Waugh.
‘How’s Hughesy going?’ Waugh said. ‘He’s not looking that good against the short ball.’
Berry replied, ‘He never does, but I’ll put my house on him making a century today.’
Waugh indicated, without saying it directly, that Hughes was a good chance to be picked for the Brisbane Test if Clarke became unavailable.
‘Just stick with him for a few Tests,’ Berry said.
Rod Marsh, who had become chairman of the national selection panel, says, ‘It became obvious to all and sundry that he would replace Rogers as Warner’s opening partner [in the future]. That was the master plan going forward. I think that was the way it was going to be. We were very confident he would have a long and successful Test match career . . . It’s hard to say, “Yes, he would definitely have been chosen” [for the first Test]. However, he was always going to put his name up in front of the selectors but in the final analysis whether or not he would have got chosen . . . how many runs would he have got in that innings, who knows? He was just as likely to peel off 200 and make his case irresistible.’
The hour leading into lunch was, Berry recalls, ‘a torrid affair’ with the NSW players ‘giving it to him’. O’Keefe says it was normal for state players to try to get under Hughes’s skin. This day was no different.
‘He would never say a word, he’d just flick up his collar and look you in the eye and never lose your gaze,’ O’Keefe says. ‘Then he would bully you around.’
When O’Keefe came on to bowl, Hughes took nine runs off his first over. ‘He slog-swept me for four, and then whipped one violently from off-stump out through mid-wicket, and then hit the single. When he got down my end he said, “You spin the ball in, eh?” I looked at him as if to say, “At least give me an over to settle”.’
During the lunch break, Hughes looked haggard as he took off his gear and sat at the long table in the change room to graze on some food.
Berry put his arm around him and said, ‘You’re on today. Make sure you go big.’
‘Tough work out there, coach,’ Hughes said. ‘But I like it that way.’ With a glint of steel, he said, ‘They’re not getting me out today.’
He put his pads and gloves on and walked back out to bat. Cosgrove and Ferguson fell, but he had his mate Tom Cooper with him. NSW continued to bowl short. ‘The boys from NSW hated playing him because he always churned out runs against them,’ Cooper says. ‘He told the coach there’s no way I am getting out to that and that is why they started bouncing him. He didn’t look like getting out any other way and that’s why they went to that short plan. We were joking about that, saying, “What is this? How am I meant to score runs if they are going to bowl there?” They did it for quite a while and that was why he started trying a few pull shots . . . They were just trying to stop him scoring.’
Virginia and Megan sat in the Ladies Stand, at an elevated side-on vantage point. Ash Squire, his old mate from Wests, came over from the indoor nets, saw Hughes pass 50, and walked back towards the nets, thinking he would come back down later when Hughes was close to his hundred. Some of the South Australian players watched on the viewing balcony, while some were by the physio’s table inside, watching on television. All around the country, Hughes’s friends were either playing cricket or, if not, following him on their computers.
Berry went up the stairs from the change room, to watch from the upper deck of the Members’ Stand. The conversation at lunch had given him a good feeling. He could still hear Hughes’s words: ‘They’re not getting me out today.’
•
WHEN HE REACHED 40 at the SCG that day, Phillip Hughes scored his 9000th run in first-class cricket. On top of the 70-odd hundreds he had scored before leaving Macksville, he had made a handful more in grade cricket, 26 in first-class cricket, three of those for Australia in Test matches, and another ten in domestic and international one-day cricket. A week before his 26th birthday, he had scored more first-class centuries than any Australian at the same age with the exception of Ricky Ponting. More than Bradman, more than the Chappells, more than his hero Clarke or his contemporaries Smith and Warner. Those baskets in his bedroom in East Street had long since overflowed.
As the wind at the SCG changed direction, swinging from the west to a fresher sou’-easter, he set sail for another hundred. In the 47th over, Hughes said a few words to Nic Maddinson at bat-pad. Maddinson had tried to engage him in some friendly banter all morning, but Hughes would give him nothing. All he said now was, ‘You’re not getting me out.’
He was 63 not out and batting at the Randwick end when Sean Abbott dropped the third ball of the 49th over, the 161st of Hughes’s innings, short of a length. Phillip thought, no doubt, ‘Here’s four more,’ and attempted to pull Abbott’s bouncer. He was through his shot a fraction early, and the ball hit him on the back of his neck. He bent, hands on his knees. He rose again and then fell forward onto the pitch.
The seriousness of the injury was apparent almost immediately to the players and umpires on the field and to the doctor who attended to him in front of the Members Stand. David Warner sprinted for the change room to request an emergency phone call, and sprinted back. Virginia and Megan watched on in shock and disbelief. The NSW players walked from the field in a daze. When an ambulance arrived, it had been 23 minutes since the first call, almost half an hour since Hughes had been struck.
Around the cricket country, the news spread. Sheffield Shield players in Brisbane and Melbourne were informed through the day. Phillip’s network of mates in Sydney, up the coast, in Adelaide, and all around Australia were on their phones. Soon they were converging on St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, where their innate optimism – this is cricket, you can get hurt but you cannot die – was, over the next two days, taken from them.
Farewells were said, at St Vincent’s and elsewhere, before his life support was switched off on Thursday 27 November. Clarke, Henderson and Cricket Australia doctor Peter Brukner helped to manage the press of friends and cricketers who came to the hospital. There was a discovery, for many, of how many close friends Phillip Hughes had inside and outside the cricket world. They each felt a special kinship with him.
Perhaps friendship, even more than cricket and cattle, was his greatest talent.
