PHIL Hughes already was a star-crossed cricketer.
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From a banana farm in northern NSW, he came to big-time cricket with a technique as rustic as his backstory, but a knack of making runs.
From the start, he was enigmatic.
His technical kink has been a penchant for playing from outside the line of the ball and scoring prodigiously from slashes through the off-side field.
Awful to say so now, but purists looked upon this method as timid.
In his first series, the South African bowlers mistakenly dwelt on this and bowled at his body and head.
He made a duck at his first Test outing, then centuries in each innings of his second Test, a feat of unprecedented precocity, founding an unexpected Australian series win. He was just 20.
But Hughes’ whimsical way proved not to be sustainable in international cricket, and his progression became staccato.
Two years later, in what was by then his third start in Test cricket, New Zealand pitched up rather than short, and Hughes was caught four times in a row by the same second slip fieldsman from the same unprepossessing bowler, Chris Martin.
In five years since his debut, he has played 26 Tests, the last at Lord’s 15 months ago.
But it was not as if he was forgotten, nor was he written off, far from it.
He continued to make runs prolifically, for NSW, and then — hoping a change of scenery might bring about a change of luck — for South Australia since last season.
As recently as August, he made 243 not out for Australia A against South Africa A in Townsville.
He made every auxiliary team and every tour, including the most recent, to play Pakistan in the Middle East last month.
He was always in the selectors’ deliberations and the public conversation, but only spasmodically in the Test team, and never for long.
Nearly always, the next man was preferred: Usman Khawaja, Shaun Marsh, George Bailey, Chris Rogers, Alex Doolan and, most recently, Glenn Maxwell.
When it became apparent yesterday Test captain Michael Clarke would miss next week’s first Test match against India, Hughes’ name again was on every lip and tip.
Hughes is still a young man, due to turn 26 on Sunday.
He is short, outwardly quiet and undramatic.
He has never inveighed against his misfortune, but merely reminded himself to make more runs.
His impermeable temperament weighs against his porous technique. On Monday, he was Test-endorsed as a “little fighter” by Allan Border, the original little fighter.
Now that epithet, with its martial overtones, echoes eerily.
The armour of modern cricket tends to disguise not just the batsman, but the ever-present danger in the game.
A fortnight ago, Pakistan batsman Ahmed Shehzad was hit in the head in a match against New Zealand in Abu Dhabi and hospitalised.
Vivid images of other accidents spring to mind: bandaged Rick McCosker in the Centenary Test in 1977, bloodied Peter Toohey in the West Indies a little while later.
In a scary parallel 25 years ago, free-scoring Jamie Siddons was pressing hard for Australian selection when his jaw was smashed by a rising ball from Merv Hughes in a Shield match at the MCG.
Siddons never did play a Test.
Do not doubt that those memories are impressed in the deep subconscious of anyone who plays the game.
That ball is hard, and comes at a frightful pace.
Whatever forces shaped Hughes’ unorthodox methodology, his instinct was sound.
Then yesterday, he played a hook shot at former teammate Sean Abbott and by freakish and incalculable chance was struck in a fleetingly exposed spot.
It was an Achillean tragedy.
The game was called off for the day, for how could anything be a game now?