Phillip Hughes did not want to play his first game of cricket.
But his older brother Jason’s under-10’s team was short a player, and Phillip, only seven, was shanghai-ed in under veiled threats he would be a “wuss” if he didn’t.
He was sent in at the bottom of the order – for surely the last time – and made 25. A love affair with the game was born.
The improbable, irresistible cricketing career of Phillip Hughes, begun that day, was ended last week.
He was felled by a bouncer on Tuesday while batting in a Sheffield Shield game at the SCG, and never regained consciousness. Hughes was 25 years old, five days short of his 26th birthday. He was 63 not out.
His captain and friend, Michael Clarke, choked back tears as he spoke of a late-night visit this week to the wicket at the SCG, “those same blades of grass” he and Hughes had shared as teammates.
Clarke, alone on this night, looked around the empty stands that once held the crowds that cheered Hughes’s eccentric range of shots.
Clarke stared at the fences once battered by his teammates’ bludgeonings.
“I stood at the wicket, I knelt down to touch the grass, and I could sense he was here with me, telling me ‘we’ve got to dig in, to get through to tea’ … before passing on a useless fact about cows, and then swaggering back to the end, grinning at the bowler and calling me through for a run in a booming voice.”
While Hughes’s immense cricketing gifts brought him to the nation’s, and the world’s, attention, his funeral heard mostly of his life away from the wicket: the big baby dubbed ‘buffon’ by a grandfather who thought he was chunky; the young boy obsessed with catching a legendary giant fish said to inhabit the Nambucca river; the teenager surprised and disappointed to learn that a school called “Homebush Boys” didn’t have any female students; the aspiring cattleman never happier than at work on the farm
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