Forever young, that’s how we’ll remember Phillip Hughes
IT always takes you aback slightly when you see a Test cricketer close up.
Normally you observe them from afar, when they’re involved in what they do best, and trying mighty hard at it. Then they’re usually a little flushed. They’re suncreamed, stubbly, slightly grim.
But in repose — whether in a hotel lobby, or boarding a bus, or traipsing to training, or simply tapping on their phones — they look astonishing, young, taut from the discipline of their various physical regimes, but still almost teenage in their gawkiness.
To excel in sport, of course, involves a kind of indefinite extending of youth, with its boundless horizons of future possibility.
Watching Phillip Hughes, so boyish, cheerful and amiable, was all about the future. There was barely any past.
I remember a media conference on the 2009 Ashes tour. Twenty-year-old Hughes was asked what he recalled about the preceding Ashes in England.
Not much, he said. He’d been in Year 10 at the time, and hadn’t been allowed to stay up and watch it.
Long-headed critics looked askance at his homespun technique: so raw, so original, so seemingly ingenuous. But it came underpinned by a prodigy’s record, and a knack for hundreds, which few in his generation shared.
Hughes played the first Test of that series at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. He cut his eighth ball for four. The journalist in front of me, a good Aussie patriot, said aloud with lipsmacking satisfaction: “The first of many!”
He seemed vindicated when the next one was dispatched identically.
Eighteen months ago, I watched Hughes bat with enormous maturity and poise at Trent Bridge in the Test match now remembered for the spectacular stroke play of Ashton Agar. I speculated at the time that his unbeaten 81 would in the long term be more significant than Agar’s star-spangled 98, being as Australian cricket was in sorer need of top-order stoicism than tailend heroics.
In each case, in 2009 and last year, the selectors left Hughes out after another Test.
There was work for him to do on that technique, not at that stage quite secure enough for the lures, baits and pitfalls of the top level. But we were all of us — peers, pundits, selectors, spectators — dealing in blue sky with Hughes.
He had the attitude. He had the look. Here was a cricketer, we told ourselves, with time on his side. Perhaps he assuaged his disappointments the same way. Certainly, he handled himself as first reserve with dignity, patience and enthusiasm.
Thus the intensity of the shock at his loss. Hughes is the tomorrow cricketer who will now form part of history. He is not the youngest Test cricketer to die. That tragic mantle still belongs to Manjural Islam Rana, the Bangladeshi spinner who was 22 when he died in a traffic accident in March 2007.
But he has become the first to be cut down, as it were, before our very eyes — in the act, in full bloom, in the presence of his mother and sister, by a delivery from a bowler who just six weeks ago was his teammate in a one-day series in the Gulf.
Every line of that is torture to write, and I simply watched him play cricket. What can palliate the blow for his immediate circle?
There will be analyses, repercussions, maybe even recriminations. When our modern bubble of safety is pricked, we ache for objects of ire, and some have already been lined up as potentially blameworthy: the bouncer, the helmet, the medics, an anonymous ABC tweeter.
But please, not yet. Why sour tragedy with anger? That the world has turned topsy-turvy is enough to cope with for the present.
A Test match is scheduled for next Thursday. In all likelihood, Hughes would have resumed his Test career there. What just days ago we looked forward to, we now dread.
The longer term? Cricket reserves a corner of its mythology for the unheard melody — always, as Keats wrote, the sweeter.
Bradman’s well-loved contemporary Archie Jackson, 23 when he perished of tuberculosis, played just eight Test matches but is remembered today.
Google “Archie Jackson” and the face that looks out is as fresh and youthful as Hughes’s.
That is how this good young man, Phillip Hughes, will remain: good and young forever.
