Phil Hughes incident reminds us that cricket is a dangerous game
Date
November 25, 2014 - 6:26PM
Malcolm Knox
Sports columnist
What we never see are the professional batsman's everyday bruises, the welts and grazes and cuts and deep purple contusions. Because nobody outside the changing room witnesses what happens to an average batsman's body on an average day facing fast bowling, the spectator might forget what a cricket ball can do.
Players know, and it is a shame that the machismo of elite sport places a veil of secrecy over the ever-present dangers they face. When Peter Lever hit Ewen Chatfield on the temple with a bouncer in 1975 and brought him unconscious to the ground, the Englishman burst into tears. Chatfield had swallowed his tongue, and it was only the quick thinking of English physiotherapist Bernard Thomas to clear his throat and give him a heart massage that saved Chatfield from becoming the first fatality on a Test ground.
There is fear at both ends of the pitch. Sean Abbott must have been ashen when he saw what had happened to Phillip Hughes at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Tuesday. When Lever visited Chatfield in hospital, Chatfield said, 'He looked worse than I did.'
But when near-death can be turned, in retrospect, into a good story, it affords a distraction and masks the seriousness of the consequences. Playing his hundredth Test match, Justin Langer was knocked out by a bouncer from Makhaya Ntini. The story of how Langer wanted to go out and bat in the second innings but was stopped by his captain Ricky Ponting ? and of how Langer said the friendship was not as important as the Test match ? added to the mythology of the game, but it also concealed the honour and good sense in Ponting's actions. Even in the time of helmets, a cricket ball is a lethal missile. Friendship was more important than the Test match.
When we think of Vivian Richards, what do we say about him batting without a helmet against Lillee and Thomson, Imran, Willis, Lawson and McDermott, not to mention a few slippery West Indians in domestic cricket? We marvel at the skill, the arrogance, the courage. We say little about the sheer stupidity. The great batsman got away with it, but the most eloquent statement about the example Richards set has been made by all those thousands of batsmen who have opted not to follow it.
A helmet, as we already knew, is no guarantee. Protective padding has improved. Guards of all kinds are worn. Pitches are flatter. The age of lightning-fast bowlers has gone. Retired cricketers in commentary booths turn fear into funny stories, so that you would never know how often they were shaking to their bones. For whole seasons, cricket seems safe and soft.
Words can do little to express the cricket community's concern and goodwill for Hughes. The rarity of serious injuries, and the desire of batsmen to mask their wounds and hide their fear, insulates us all from the fundamental fact that cricket is a dangerous game. Many disagree with compulsory helmets in junior cricket, arguing against the harmful effects of helmets on batting technique. Bad technique or a bad head injury? Little choice, really.
What speaks louder than words are the garden-variety bruises, the X-rays showing the bones that are cracked and chipped and crushed on a daily basis. Like success and failure on the scoreboard, escaping injury is, to an underappreciated degree, a matter of luck. The threat of harm is the price of sport, but it is a price that is not shared equally.
