A blow to the gentleman's game

One minute Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes was in his happy place, batting for South Australia in the Sheffield Shield at Sydney Cricket Ground, 63 not out; the next, he’d keeled forward onto the pitch, after having been hit by a bouncer. Two days later he was dead.

VIDEO: Cricket fans in Wellington on the death of Phillip Hughes and whether the rules of the game need to change.

New South Wales player Sean Abbott’s ball had struck Hughes in the neck, just below his ear, in a spot that wasn’t protected by his helmet. The impact fractured his skull and split an artery, causing “catastrophic bleeding” in his brain. After being given mouth-to-mouth on the cricket pitch, he was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital, where he was put in an induced coma. He died on Wednesday November 27. The Independent likened the “very rare” injury to that more often caused by the kind of impact experienced in a car crash.

The tragedy was remarkable not only the speed with which it happened, but Hughes’ age: he was only 25, days shy of 26. He was also a much-loved figure in the cricketing world, as evidenced by the #putoutyourbats tribute that spread on social media after word of his death.

In a sprawling interactive feature, The Australian describes Hughes as a man respected for both his talent and personality. “There is nobody at the elite level of the game in Australia who didn’t respect Hughes, but when you win the unquestioning admiration of men such as Langer, Hayden, Clarke, Katich and Ponting, you have won the respect of men who placed the highest value on character and commitment.”

Remembering his achievements in the Guardian, Russell Jackson remarked on both Hughes’ love of the sport and his “huge impact” on it:

Was there ever a moment of more pure cricketing joy than the reaction of Phillip Hughes to that century-bringing six at Durban? He seemed to have shocked even himself with the improvised swat-sweep that got him over the line. Hughes jumped up and punched the air as though he’d just nailed a full-court buzzer-beater. Ricky Ponting emerged at an open dressing room window and as his teammates joined him in a standing ovation, his face lit up with happiness. Here was a kid, Ponting’s grin said, who had what Australia was looking for.

Hughes’ death has stunned Australia, where cricket is considered the national game, as well as the rest of the sporting community around the world. His funeral in Macksville, New South Wales, yesterday was live-streamed, and as Vic Marks wrote in the Guardian, “all around Australia just about everyone [stopped] what they [were] doing”. Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Stokes wrote that Hughes’ death would have been many Australians’ first experience of mortality.

But no sooner than Hughes had been hospitalised were questions asked about who was to blame. Though there have been serious injuries in the history of cricket, one of Hughes’ severity is rare. Was it a freak accident, or all the more tragic for being preventable?

The manufacturers of his helmet said he was wearing an outdated model that offered less protection to the neck and head than their current line – though, “this is a vulnerable area of the head and neck that helmets cannot fully protect while enabling batsmen to have full and proper movement”.

Cricket Australia is to conduct an investigation into players’ safety in the wake of the incident. But beyond headgear, Hughes’ death has prompted criticism of what some see as the flawed priorities of the game. Mark Reason writes that “it has taken a mawkish media campaign, a vigil of arc lights and candle lights, of black armbands and of propped remembrance willow, to tell people how to behave” in the sport. Players have become more interested in speed and gamesmanship than sportsmanship and safety, he says: “ICC chief executive Dave Richardson states it is unlikely that anything will be done to curb bouncers. On the day that Macksville mourns, the question is why?”

Some have renewed the age-old call to put a spot to sledging in sport. Writing for CricInfo, former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe reflects on the number of times he was struck by the ball; he was once hospitalised after being hit between the eyes. He recalls the delivery that made him finally decide to wear a helmet fulltime. “None of these fine folk meant any spite or malice, although I am not convinced Andy Roberts’ two deliberate consecutive beamers at Taunton in 1984 were delivered with any grace or goodwill. We all have these kinds of moments in the game that we endured somehow.”

You don’t go to a cricket field to do your work, your job, and expect to be killed, so there’s a lot of guys that are hurting at the moment...so that’s going to have an impact for a time yet.

But, Crowe says, the gentleman’s game needs to calm down – it’s not the “uncouth WWF”. “Show the youth of today the right way to play the game respectfully, hard and fair,” he says. “The game has turned too lippy, too edgy. Let’s chill a bit in general, as a good lesson and reminder, to keep the game authentic.”

Mike Selvey echoed the sentiment in the Guardian Australia: “In no ways was Hughes being reckless, but there is nonetheless a recklessness in the modern game, a by-product of the improvements in the protective equipment offered to batsmen. They feel safe, and therefore more able to indulge in strokeplay where more discretion might once have been shown.”

The head of the New Zealand Players’ Association Heath Mills told Morning Report that there’s no doubt administrators will need to have discussions about how the incident could have been prevented. “You don’t go to a cricket field to do your work, your job, and expect to be killed, so there’s a lot of guys that are hurting at the moment...so that’s going to have an impact for a time yet.”

But whatever change to the game of cricket Hughes’ death results in, it is a timely and tragic reminder of the risk all sportspeople incur every time they take to the field.

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