Cricket's lottery sees Phillip Hughes knocked into mortality

It is hard to know what to think. A Tuesday night and a young man lies in a coma, our expectations in a crumpled heap at the door.

At the same time, as ever, young men lie in hospitals the world over. As do young women, and small children, and those without the poignancy of youth to gloss their plight.

Another young man has lain months dead in St Peter’s Cemetery, St Louis, and the United States caught fire as the man who shot him six times walked free.

Across the world, rage-fuelled armies assembled from scraps fight wars that even they can’t quite explain. At home our own government strives to legislate hard-heartedness into our national character, while blankly denying plain facts and refusing to answer questions.

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All through Tuesday the internet channelled these concurrent disasters, converging tributaries of ugliness. It is hard not to see the world as black and bleak.

Against the broader gloom, Phillip Hughes’ plight still stands out because the innocence we apportion to cricket has crashed down like plate glass. The game that forms such a rich and lengthy pastime should not levy this cost on one of its exponents.

The late hours of Tuesday night will have been the longest in his family’s vigil, and for all of us in the broadening ripples of the cricketing world who kept flicking an eye over updates and feeling itchily uninclined to retire. I would guess some opponents and teammates from Tuesday’s abandoned Shield game remained awake together, even in silence, in that human tendency to gather after trauma.

This is the hardest time to know what to think, because all is a Rumsfeldian known unknown. We are forced to withdraw to monstrous basics: the first question is whether Hughes will live, the second whether he’ll live unimpaired. It is unfair beyond belief to wonder things like this, rather than where he might bat in the order or when he’ll get a fair Test run.

It is the same mixture of anxiety, hope and nausea as when New Zealand batsman Jesse Ryder was beaten in a late-night assault in 2013. The induced coma, the long wait, the steps of recovery. It took several attackers to put Ryder in that state, not one desperately unlucky strike with the ball. He not only pulled through, he returned to elite cricket. But the results of head injuries are beyond prediction.

For most cricketers, on any given weekend, their physical price might be twanged hamstrings, aching calves, cracked digits. In the lowly ranks of the Yarra Pub League last weekend our opener top-edged the ball into his face. Some of you might have heard Jonathan Woods commentating the recent Pakistan Tests, but that voice was muffled with ice and bloodied rags as he trailed off to St Vincent’s emergency room. Seven stitches were his penance.

No doubt Sean Abbott bowls well beyond the swiftest in our ranks, but he’s not the terror of the Sheffield Shield. For him to strike the telling blow on Hughes shows the lottery our game can be: so many wear their hits and walk away, until someone cannot. It’s the ever-current contract signed by all who take the field.

Spare a thought for Abbott, as others have suggested – he must be wretched to a degree unknown in his sporting experience. The unintentional nature of the damage will be little comfort, and his recovery will twin with that of Hughes.

The world can be an angry place, and like an office coffee pot, the worst filters down to the bottom. These days the internet is the catchment. US updates attracted bitter assertions that shoplifting deserves gunfire and resisting martial law deserves tear-gas. The ABC’s Grandstand account posted an ill-considered Hughes update on Twitter and was savaged, people cleansing themselves with pious rage, taunts and and insults well after the necessary objections had been raised.

Yet all anger toward Hughes himself evaporated. I’ve written about him often, pressing the claims of his career to date. Every article attracts a dedicated core of correspondents bemoaning his statistics, his consistency, his technique, his stance, his face and his recipe for home-made preserves.

Suddenly all that gave way to tenderness and concern, as messages in support racked up in their thousands. There is of course something rote about the phrasing – “thoughts are with you and your family”. But we handle life’s awful complexities by falling back on familiarity and custom.

I have argued previously that our stated hatred of athletes is contrived and coarse and dishonest; that we can’t claim to hate people we don’t even know. That theory was shown in practice. Hughes has been a public figure, perched among the demigods and jeered accordingly, but when he was struck and damaged he was knocked into mortality.

Phillip Hughes the man could now be considered, and no one had identified an enemy in him.

There was gentleness on the field, too: Sean Abbott cradling Hughes’ head on the pitch; the famously tough David Warner holding him on the medical cart as they drove from the field; batting partner Tom Cooper carefully removing Hughes’ pads as medical staff tended to him by the boundary line.

Now it is Wednesday morning, and with that may come more news, or none. We remain on a watching brief, with a young man’s family and friends bearing the grossest part of the burden. It is hard to know what to think, and it may not grow easier for many days to come.