Phillip Hughes: How safe will now cricket be played?
The death of Phillip Hughes two days after being hit on the neck by a short one while batting for South Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground has frozen the game into grieving incomprehension. Sheffield Shield matches had already been abandoned, as the cricketing world was bound in vigil with Hughes lying in coma. Now, upon news of his death, Pakistan and New Zealand have suspended their Test match in Sharjah for a day; and India’s practice match in Adelaide has been called off.
At 25, just three days short of his 26th birthday when he passed away, Hughes had already given a blazing account of his talent and grit: the youngest to get a hundred in both innings of a Test match, a century on one-day debut, and a consistent appetite to get runs off the fast bowlers. He had risen from the disappointment of a duck on Test debut, and that up-and-down quality informed his playing career thereafter. Now with India on a long Australia tour before the World Cup begins, Hughes was expected to be back in his national team.
To say cricket has lost a special one is putting it mildly. He did big things, and bigger things were thought to have been in store for him. But this mourning right now is also about the uncommon heroism that’s become his.
For no fault on his part – not a jot of blame can lie with him for his open-hearted thrill in taking on fast bowlers – he’s the face, the victim of cricket’s ever-present menace between bat and ball. The batsmen we see at cricket’s big stage, domestically and internationally, are so skilled that they carry their battle gear with elegance. So elegantly that we forget how much in harm’s way they must necessarily put themselves to protect their wicket, and to score.
This is not the first time the 163g cricket ball has taken a life. Raman Lamba sustained a fatal injury while fielding in a club game in Dhaka in 1998. It’s taken careers. Indian and West Indian cricketers gave blood to an injured Nari Contractor in Barbados in 1962. He survived but his career was over. On a subsequent tour of the Caribbean, at Jamaica’s Sabina Park, Bishen Bedi invited controversy when he chose to declare at 306 for six, rather than put his bowlers in sight of Michael Holding and company, and thereby add to the three Indians already injured in the innings. Bedi took the right, but very brave, option. (Read Suresh Menon’s biography of Bedi, Bishan, Portrait of a Cricketer for a recap of later appreciation of that declaration.)
What option does cricket have now? In the age of helmets of superior design and material, it’s said that the probability of a batsman sustaining grievous injury is extremely slim. Cricket’s coasted along on that probability buffer, till Hughes became the statistic that must interrogate those who play, administer and watch the game.
Examining the hazard framed by Hughes’ injury, an Economist blog puts the dilemma thus: “Watching a battle between a snarling fast-bowler and a fearless batsman at close quarters is one of the finest spectacles in sport precisely because of this tension. It is what makes them heroes to many. Cricket needs to be dangerous; it just should never be deadly. This is a fine line to walk.”
Hughes was heeding cricket’s demand for fearless batsmen, and ours for heroes; had he hooked the ball for six, or even a couple of runs, it would have been just another delivery in Sean Abbott’s over. Had Abbott, even for argument’s sake, sent the delivery any less aggressively, he’d have been letting down his side and sport’s higher call for a keen contest.
However, now one man is dead, and the other rightly being consoled by fellow cricketers that he did no wrong. And cricket, it may not be the same again, for players or for spectators. When two sportspersons play the sport as well as they can in that moment, and this happens, it cannot be.
How cricket responds in coming days will test how much it values its own, men and women like Phillip Hughes. How much danger is cricket now going to be comfortable with?