Vale Phillip Hughes

[Cabinet96]

It's still so hard to really come to terms with. The mourning process will be so long.

 

[dogwalker]

Thank you for the panic you gave me in early 2009 when you couldn't stop scoring

He just wouldn't stop scoring against us too, in 2009. I was at the ground thinking who is this bastard?

For the few friends I have that follow cricket here in SA and know who he was, it's the surreal-ness (I don't know the proper word for that) that is the dominant feeling. It just doesn't make sense.

 

[social]

Well the sun has risen again so life goes on but the world seems like a poorer place today

RIP

 

[GotSpin]

Rip...

 

[Furball]

The thing that still gets me is that I was worried when I read what they'd done to him in surgery, but thought that that was just me being overly pessimistic - after all, he'd only been hit by a cricket ball. Thousands of batsmen at all levels deal with that every year.

 

[Tangles]

RIP. Was gutted when I saw the news this morning. It's hard for it to fully sink in. A true talent taken too young.

 

[Riggins]

The thing that still gets me is that I was worried when I read what they'd done to him in surgery, but thought that that was just me being overly pessimistic - after all, he'd only been hit by a cricket ball. Thousands of batsmen at all levels deal with that every year.

Yeah it's crazy. I literally have 5 bruises between my belly button and neck at the moment.

I can't imagine what you'd think being told to field short leg in the coming weeks.

 

[Agent Nationaux]

Pak domestic cricketers paying their respects. Got the pics from PakPassion.

 

[andmark]

Loving the respect shown in the Pakistan-NZ match

 

[morgieb]

The Prince. What can I say?

Unlike some on the board (Nino, Julian, Skippos, Benchy, etc.) I never met the man. But yesterday I still felt like I lost a close friend. Why? Possibly several reasons. Perhaps it was because my interest in cricket was rising when Hughes hit the scene. Perhaps it was the feeling that he was gonna be the next big thing.....yet he never will. Perhaps it was because it was (effectively) on a cricket field, somewhere where millions of people go each year without serious harm, a shot played 99.99% of the time without harm. Perhaps because there's little upside here. Most deaths at least happen to fairly old people, where they've lived rather fulfilling lives and probably don't have a lot of regrets. But here, he was 7 months younger than my sister, and his actual career was much malinged. The only one's I can see are cliches like "he died doing what he loved" and "he died in no pain, whereas several who survive traumatic brain injuries are in need of constant care for life". And at least the former that's irrelevant IMO, due to the third reason I put out.

I hope everyone affected - his family, Sean Abbott, the rest of South Australian and NSW cricket fraternity can recover from this mentally fully. Unfortuantely, the circumstances may scar them for a long time.

Farewell, mate. 63* forever, indeed.

 

[howardj]

Loving the respect shown in the Pakistan-NZ match

Yep cricket, universally, is full of great people

The game, for some reason, attracts good people

 

[Burgey]

Yeah, wonderful tributes from so many around the world.

Not really looking forward to cricket tomorrow. Will have to say something to the kids about this I suppose.

 

[Maximas]

Yeah, wonderful tributes from so many around the world.

Not really looking forward to cricket tomorrow. Will have to say something to the kids about this I suppose.

Yeah I trained last night and the coach said some words about it, was gutted yesterday to but was nice to be in the company of people feeling the same

 

[Saint Kopite]

As always, a great read by Gideon Haigh!

It always takes you slightly aback when you see a Test cricketer close up. Normally you observe them from afar, when they’re involved in what they do best, and trying mighty hard at it. Then they’re usually a little flushed. They’re suncreamed, stubbly, slightly grim.

But in repose, whether in a hotel lobby, or boarding a bus, or traipsing to training, or simply tapping on their phones, they look astonishingly young, taut from the discipline of their various physical regimes, but still almost teenage in their gawkiness.

To excel in sport, of course, involves a kind of indefinite extending of youth, with its boundless horizons of future possibility.

Watching Phillip Hughes, so boyish, cheerful and amiable, was all about the future. There was barely any past. I remember a press conference on the 2009 Ashes tour. The then 20-year-old was asked what he recalled about the preceding Ashes in England. Not much, he said. He’d been in Year 10 at the time, and hadn’t been allowed to stay up and watch it.

Long-headed critics looked askance at his homespun technique, so raw, so original, so seemingly ingenuous. But it came underpinned by a prodigy’s record, and a knack for hundreds, which few in his generation shared.

Hughes played the first Test of that series at the SWALEC Stadium in Cardiff. He cut his eighth ball for four. The journalist in front of me, a good Aussie patriot, said aloud with lip-smacking satisfaction: “The first of many!” He seemed vindicated when the next one was dispatched identically.

Eighteen months ago, I watched Hughes bat with enormous maturity and poise at Trent Bridge in the Test match now remembered for the spectacular strokeplay of Ashton Agar. I speculated at the time that his unbeaten 81 would in the long-term be more significant than Agar’s star-spangled 98, being as Australian cricket was in sorer need of top-order stoicism than tailend heroics.

In each case, in 2009 and 2013, the selectors left Hughes out after another Test. There was work for him to do on that technique, not at that stage quite secure enough for the lures, baits and pitfalls of the top level.

But we were all of us — peers, pundits, selectors, spectators — dealing in blue sky with Hughes. He had the attitude. He had the look. Here was a cricketer, we told ourselves, with time on his side. Perhaps he assuaged his disappointments the same way. Certainly, he handled himself as first reserve with dignity, patience and enthusiasm.

Thus the intensity of the shock at his loss. Hughes is the tomorrow cricketer who will now form part of history. He is not the youngest Test cricketer to die. That tragic mantle still belongs to Manjural Islam Rana, the Bangladesh spinner who was 22 when he died in a motorbike accident in March 2007.

But he has become the first to be cut down, as it were, before our very eyes — in the act, in full bloom, in the presence of his mother and sister, by a ball from a bowler who just six weeks ago was his team-mate in a one-day series in the Gulf.

Every line of that is torture to write, and I simply watched him play cricket. What can palliate the blow for his immediate circle?

There will be analyses, repercussions, maybe even recriminations. When our modern bubble of safety is pricked, we ache for objects of ire, and some have already been lined up as potentially blameworthy: the bouncer, the helmet, the medics, an anonymous ABC tweeter.

But please, not yet. Why sour tragedy with anger? That the world has turned topsy-turvy is enough to cope with for the present. A Test match is scheduled for next Thursday in Brisbane. In all likelihood, Hughes would there have resumed his Test career. What just days ago we looked forward to we now dread.

The longer term? Cricket reserves a corner of its mythology for the unheard melody — always, as Keats wrote, the sweeter.

Bradman’s well-loved contemporary Archie Jackson, 23 when he perished of tuberculosis, played just eight Test matches but is remembered today.
Google “Archie Jackson” and the face that looks out is as fresh and youthful as Hughes’s.

That is how this good young man, Phillip Hughes, will remain: good and young for ever.

Cookies must be enabled. | The Australian

 

[Burgey]

Great writer is Gideon Haigh.

 

[Ruckus]

Tribute from cricket aus:

Special tribute to Phillip Hughes - YouTube

Still so sad...

 

[Saint Kopite]

Man, Going through the #putoutyourbats mentions on Twitter. Very touching and emotional.

 

[Dan]

Between the Haigh article, that video, and the email I got from our local association talking about minutes silence and black armbands, I'm close to tears again.

Everything about this situation is so, so ****ed.

 

[Spark]

Between the Haigh article, that video, and the email I got from our local association talking about minutes silence and black armbands, I'm close to tears again.

Everything about this situation is so, so ****ed.

Never thought I'd say anything like this but the Sutherland presser was almost impossible to watch as well

 

[uvelocity]

oh man this putoutyourbats thing is getting me