Just to prove that journalist can multi-task with the best of them, I watched the NSW Waratahs defeat the gutsy Queensland Reds in an unconvincing fashion at the Sydney Football Stadium while plugged in to ABC 702 to listen to Phillip Hughes smashing the much-vaunted South African bowling attack to all parts on and over the field.
When I got home and settled in front of the TV set to actually watch the play, Hughes had reached the devil’s number of 87 and had faced 110 balls, with the apparently unlucky 111th delivery to come up.
Like that eccentric English umpire Shepherd I hopped on one leg while Hughes kept out the 111th delivery.
Now I had to navigate him through to his maiden Test century.
Australian cricketers have a thing about 87 which they regard as a fatal number of runs for too many batsmen. Presumably this is because 87 is 13 (another unlucky number to some – but not to me having been born on the 13th July) away from 100. The habit in the dressing room is not to change what you are doing until the dreaded 87 is past.
So there I was hopping on one leg while the South African spinner Paul Harris trundled down his tight, quickish leg-arm stuff. Luckily for me Hughes pushed a ball away and was soon into the 90s.
Now I had to navigate him through the nervous 90s. But this was a breeze, the boy wonder, as the Sydney Morning Herald is calling him, belted Harris for two successive sixers.
The second hit was bigger than the first and as soon as Hughes made contact with the ball he ran down the pitch, took off his helmet, pumped his arms to his team-mates and behaved rather like a bloke who has been accepted for a date by a latter-day version of Bo Derek.
As readers of The Roar might have noticed from previous posts, I have taken an almost proprietary interest in Hughes ever since I saw him play his first first-class innings at the SCG and came back home that afternoon and predicted Australian honours for him, sooner rather than later.
So entranced was I with his possibilities that I harangued Peter Roebuck about him before the third Test against South Africa at the SCG. Insisted that he had to be selected for the South African tour, that Hayden must be dropped (he retired before being pushed in the end) and that Simon Katich and Hughes, two left-handers with great temperaments, were the openers for the next couple of years.
Hughes was out in his first Test to the fourth ball he faced for a duck. I wrote a comment that one of the greatest of openers, Sir Leonard Hutton, made a duck in his first Test inning. I deliberately chose Hutton for the comparison because I believe that Hughes will be seen in that sort of company when his Test career is over in a decade or so years.
In the second innings I watched him belt his way to the top-score of 76 having belted seven fours the night before in bad light in making 36 out of 51 runs.
Now he’s made a century in his third Test inning – with two for the Test having scored another one overnight – a Bradmanlike rate that he won’t maintain. But he is one of the youngest Australians to have scored a Test hundred; and the youngest Test cricketer ever to score twin centuries in a Test.
More importantly, it was an inning that answered his critics (Roebuck being one) about his loose technique and the South Africans who told him he was a coward the way he backed away to force balls to the offside.
It’s true that his technique is not copybook, the way Hutton’s or Sachin Tendulkar’s technique delight the purists. But other great openers have had slightly unorthodox methods. Herbert Sutcliffe (one of the few batsmen with a 60-plus Test average) and Arthur Morris (a boy wonder before the Second World War), for instance, both played with a lot of bottom hand.
Hughes is short. He can get very low and cut virtually any ball, the reason why he is inclined to give himself room to play the cut shot by pulling back sometimes to the legside.
He has a slashing off-drive which he plays with his hands sliding up the bat handle and giving a long blade to the errant ball. He scores very quickly. His 115 came off only 132 balls. Katich, by way of comparison, scored 108 off 190 balls.
He is a clean hitter when he goes for the clout, as his two sixers to achieve his maiden century testify and the thunderous over against Morne Morkel (who had sledged him at Johannesburg) when the boy wonder belted four fours to put the lanky and talkative fast bowler in his place.
What you look for with great batsmen is temperament and the ability to play the big innings when a big innings is needed. Hughes scored a century in the Sheffield Shield final to wrap up the match for NSW: he scored 181 at Newcastle when he was in a bat-off with Phil Jacques for the tour to South Africa: and now he’s scored double Test hundreds in a match that sees Australia remain number 1 if it is won or drawn.
Temperament is not something that is learnt, in my opinion. You have it or you don’t have it. You see it in the great players when things are tough. ‘When the going is tough,’ the old adage says, ‘the tough get going.’
Hughes is a golden boy who is bound for glory, in my view. And it’s going to be fun watching him on his wonderful journey.
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