This is not the script. It’s all I can keep saying, impotent against the weight of fact bearing the other way.
The script didn’t necessarily cover a Test this week, but it covered the summer ODIs and the World Cup beyond them, given the way the kid had carted 50-over attacks of late. At the longest, we would have waited until Chris Rogers’ retirement after an Ashes win in 2015, and from then, the Australian opening position would belong to Phillip Joel Hughes.
With the mountain of runs he’d made in 2014, it was inevitable. He was on the way back. He was going to be great.
This wasn’t in the script. The accident, the gravity of the news reports coming from the Sydney Cricket Ground. But when it happened, even the accident was supposed to have a script. A terrible injury, an induced coma, then some kind of recovery.
I was not so blind or arrogant as to assume that script would include a cricketing comeback, a final attainment of the Test dream so long withheld. I was prepared to concede that basic recovery might overwrite sporting redemption, and was of course so vastly more important. If the latter were to arise from the former though, it would have been the greatest script of all.
The night after Hughes was injured, I wrote of the nature of vigils. “We are forced to withdraw to monstrous basics: the first question is whether Hughes will live, the second whether he’ll live unimpaired.” Yet when I put those words down I didn’t think they would happen.
It was a superstitious accounting for the worst-case scenario, warding it off by saying its name, simultaneously acknowledgement and amulet. Those words were a signed cross, a muttered Inshallah. I never truly believed they would come true.
Four days later, that idea has proved crushingly naïve. The prognosis was clear, even if not public, from the early stages. The grimness emanating from St Vincent’s hospital and the cricket scribes covering the story was not just born of anxiety. The pilgrimage of teammates were not just visiting. The half hour of CPR on the boundary line assumed its true significance. There had never been hope of recovery. In essence Hughes had died where he first fell.
It’s 2 am on a warm summer night
And we grease the dark with grief
Open up that other bottle
And try to befriend death.
So relates the poet Eleanor Jackson. But this wasn’t what we were supposed to be doing, the cricket communities joining online or at gatherings around the world. We were not supposed to be up in those early hours reading the tributes and the disbelief as a way to feel less alone in our sadness for someone most of us had never met. The lines were all wrong. So many people felt the same. Euan Robertson messaged me on Twitter: “Was just thinking, 100 against England at Lord’s next year. That’s the script. That’s meant to be the fucking script.”
We can’t help making grief personal. I couldn’t help feeling glad that at least I was a Hughes fan, not a knocker. I’d written in support of him, backed him to come good. And he would have done. Self-important commenters loved to sagely inform us that some players just can’t cope at the top level – as though they knew from their own deep experience. That argument always neglected fundamental information: that Hughes was 25, that every run he’d had in the team had been too short, unsettled, subject to change. Patience was all that was required.
Most will cite his teenage tons against South Africa as his defining scene. For me it will be the more modest environs of this year’s development tour, when Australia A hosted the Indian and South African reserves in the quiet of Darwin and Townsville. Told as ever to pile on the runs, Hughes faced down a series of 50-over games and unofficial Tests to return 34, 12, 100*, 21, 202*, 58, 51, 23, 12 and 243*. That included his highest List A and first-class scores, and the first List A double ton by an Australian.
From there the script was clear. I was sure he would leave the doubters in his wake. Now the contention will forever stay unproved.
There is no better look at the Hughes situation than Jarrod Kimber’s incredible essay on the Australian obsession with ‘the natural’ – a kid of near-mythological ability and provenance, who emerges from the hills to be incredible with no apparent effort, and never falters from then on.
The natural doesn’t exist. Even Don Bradman wasn’t quite it, not at the start. For his first Test moments Hughes was, and then he wasn’t. He paid for it ever since. That sense of being unfairly done by in cricket was distorted to heartbreaking levels by the manner of his exit.
Right now we should be looking forward to the summer, the energy and happiness, the banter and sledging, making jokes about cricket and cricketers. Right now that’s the last thing anyone wants to do. Jokes sound tinny. The feeling is a dull funk. Attending the Test series ahead seems like being sentenced to a long summer in a mausoleum.
The match at the Gabba should go on – everyone in cricket needs somewhere to focus, and Hughes himself was denied too many Tests for Australia to call off more in his name. But right now I really don’t care if they play. I don’t care if I take my flight to Brisbane and stare at an empty cricket ground, thinking of better things to do than talk about a game that in the face of all this means nothing.
And if the Australians do come, I hope they come swathed in black armbands. They should wear them spilling down their arms, hooping knees and ankles. They should hand them round the crowd and fill the stands. They should wear them until cricket whites are lost beneath the colours of mourning. Right now it feels like they should never take them off.
This article was originally published in Wisden India.
Through electric bowling, dashing batting and acrobatic fielding the West Indies made themselves one of the most popular teams throughout history.
After posting 92 with the bat, the RCB star was having an equally brilliant day in the field.
The RCB opener posted a man-of-the-match 92 off 47, as his side defeated Punjab Kings by 60 runs.
The opener scored a man-of-the-match 89 off 30, in the 10-wicket win against Lucknow Super Giants that came off just 9.4 overs.
Nathan Lyon believes Australia would have won the 2023 Ashes series 4-0 if he hadn't broken down with injury. But the veteran spinner says…
The recent announcement of Australia’s T20 World Cup squad took me back to the 1983 ODI World Cup campaign - one of our great…
