Four years ago, cricket was numbed by the tragic death of Australia batsman Phillip Hughes. The 2015 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack carried this magnificent tribute by Andrew Ramsey.
Andrew Ramsey is a senior writer for cricket.com.au
In Westleigh, a commuter suburb in the city where Phillip Hughes had once learned his trade, a simple gesture from a 48-year-old IT worker and former Sydney grade cricketer – who placed his bat outside his house, and a navy blue Mosman CC cap on the bat handle, and posted the photo on Twitter – lit the way for a global show of grief.
In Adelaide, Hughes’s adopted home, a 26-year-old nurse without the slightest interest in cricket sobbed uncontrollably when a radio bulletin confirmed the unspoken fear Australia had carried for two days.
Within a month, the notion that international cricket’s nature would be indelibly changed was exposed as naive. The game will go on, although its rhythm is destined to skip a beat every time a player is struck with force, or a doctor sprints from the dressing room.
But in Sydney, in Adelaide, in Macksville, and in those other pockets where Hughes’s spirit burns within men and women and boys and girls playing cricket at their local ground, on the beach, in their backyard – in all those places a new awareness of just how ephemeral each innings can be surely now resides. That will remain Phillip Hughes’s inextinguishable legacy.
Read more Almanack articles.
Previously from the almanack: Beefy & Viv: Great friends & cricketing immortals
