The Spirit of Phil Hughes
It’s funny what can remind you of someone.
Early in Australia’s pursuit of a target of 173 in the T20 World Cup final against New Zealand, David Warner faces up to Tim Southee.
The first over of the chase has yielded one run to Warner in three attempts off Trent Boult. Aaron Finch, Warner’s opening partner and captain, has been beaten twice off the last two deliveries he has faced. To Southee’s first ball, Warner attempts a pull stroke but shanks it towards mid-on.
There’s a jaded old sporting cliché about setting the tone for a match. It’s terrible and cringeworthy and bad. It’s straight up silly in a fast sport like T20, which is custom designed to change tones rather than set them. There is value to setting tones in this instance, though, because the direction of this match is yet to be determined. On the evidence of the first seven deliveries out of the 120 available to Australia on this night, they are all at sea.
Southee will hang the next two deliveries on the edge of Warner’s striking range, and dare him to punch a hole through a scrum of fielders to his off-side.
Warner has two options. He can angle the ball down to third and pass the buck on to Finch, or he can take on the challenge that Southee has thrown him.
The first ball is met with a concussive crash. It’s a half-drive, half-smash, scorching past the off-side field, through the covers for four. The second is lashed with a furious swipe of a cut stroke, flying over the point fielder, and into the boundary for four more.
The two deliveries tear into the defensive field like a fresh pair of scissors effortlessly shearing through a sheet of paper. There’s only one other left-hander I’ve ever seen hit the ball square of the wicket on the off-side like that.
Warner was good friends with him, in fact.
As Warner gets a jump start on the road to taking this match away from New Zealand, I find myself thinking of Phil Hughes.
Cricket broke on November 25, 2014.
On that day, twenty-five year old Phil Hughes was batting on 63 in a domestic match in Sydney when he was struck by a ball on the side of his neck. He fell to the ground, and never got up again.
If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to explain what watching cricket — any cricket — during the Australian summer that followed felt like. The air of mute shock that followed Hughes’ passing on November 27 hung around every match that I watched. The moment of nervous panic when Virat Kohli was struck on the badge of his helmet by a Mitchell Johnson bouncer in Adelaide that December was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in sport. And the then-Australian captain Michael Clarke’s tearful eulogy for Hughes might be the single most heartbreaking speech I’ve ever heard out of a cricketer.
Speaking to a crowd of Hughes’ family and friends, Clarke, still visibly unable to process that he was really gone, said, “I don’t know about you, but I keep looking for him.”
At once, cricket seemed incredibly powerful as well as utterly meaningless.
Finch doesn’t get better at negotiating Boult, and soon falls for five.
By the time his replacement Mitchell Marsh faces a ball, Australia are one down for 15 in three overs. The target of 173 seems far, far away.
What happens in the next couple of minutes changes the direction of the match.
A big reason why Marsh is in this team is that his best weapons are against extreme lengths. Bowl really short and you’ll disappear, bowl really full and you’ll disappear too. To make this work, he sets up quite heavy on his back leg, and then uses his considerable frame to power through the ball. Partly because of this, he sometimes gets out in clumsy-looking ways: unable to sort his feet out, leg-before to stuff he should be flicking away, struggling against spin that keeps low.
Adam Milne is the opposite of a spinner but his first ball to Marsh engages the other two problems. It’s fast, on a length, tailing in, and an open dare to Marsh to show that he has become better at his known weaknesses.
Remarkably, Marsh plays the ball as if he already knew where it was going to land. He stays still, keeps his weight perfectly in between his feet, and picks the ball up with a swoosh over square-leg, and into the crowd.
Six.
It’s a ludicrous stroke.
Milne, whose first ball in the final this also was, corrects course on the next attempt by staying away from Marsh’s suddenly ferocious leg-side swing. He pushes Marsh back with a high ball that’s tight outside the off-stump but Marsh deflects it a few metres to the keeper’s right. Lucky, but four. To the next ball, on a similar length but slightly straighter, Marsh pivots on his back leg, and cracks a pull stroke for four more. Fourteen runs in all; he has basically doubled Australia’s three-over score in three balls.
As Marsh gets off strike, that first-ball pick-up stroke for six is still ringing in my eyes, if there is such a thing.
The thought wouldn’t have come to me had I not made the connection with Warner’s off-side boundaries before but, now that it’s here, it refuses to leave:
You know who else used to play a pick-up stroke for six like that?
Phil Hughes.
Only a superhuman effort by Clarke’s team made the broken pieces of that Australian summer make sense. It was — and I say this in admiration — the effort that both crowned and ended Clarke’s career. Look back on that time now, and you’ll find two distinct late-career Michael Clarkes: the one who was captain of Australia before Hughes, and the one who was captain of Australia after. The 2015 ODI World Cup was co-hosted by Australia at the end of the Hughes summer. The idea that Australia wouldn’t win that tournament for him never seemed to enter Clarke’s mind.
Fate rarely bends to collective will in the way Australia made it do that year. When it was over, though, and the grief had yielded its prize, a silence came over the subject of Hughes’ loss. That’s how sport works sometimes. Something happens in the real world, the world reacts to it, it is moulded to the demands of the story, the story plays out, out comes a result, a result brings finality, and everyone moves on.
The Australian men’s team did a fine service to Phil Hughes by winning that World Cup, but they hadn’t won a world title since.
Until Sunday.
Warner and Marsh’s five hits to the fence are the highlights of a tense batting powerplay for Australia.
Both batters are cautious about taking too much on. They know that a dismissal will likely bring in a slower starting batter to face the New Zealand spinners. Neither Mitchell Santner nor Ish Sodhi are prodigious wicket-takers but with Australia still needing 130 to win off fourteen overs, they don’t have to be. Eight quiet overs from them will yank this match back in New Zealand’s direction.
So far, Warner has taken on Southee, and Marsh has taken on Milne. Now they combine to take on New Zealand’s spinners. What begins as an intriguing contest soon turns into a rout. Marsh takes the lead in a ten-run over off Santner. Warner responds by carting Sodhi for sixteen in the over that follows. In the blink of an eye, Australia need less than nine runs an over, with nine wickets in hand.
The last time they were this firmly in control in a match this big was also against New Zealand.
It was the final of the World Cup they won for Phil Hughes.
The six years since 2015 have brought me a peculiar personal affectation with this Australian team. Belief that they’re going to win a match comes in three stages.
Stage One is plausibility. Here, that arrived with the thirty-nine runs they took off the four Santner-Sodhi overs.
Stage Two is turning favourites. That arrives now, as both batters take Jimmy Neesham for a Hughes-style pick-up six each in the eleventh over. They’ve had a look at all of New Zealand’s bowling now. It’s 76 off 54 needed to win. Surely, I think, they should win from here.
Stage Three, however, requires me to feel comfortable that they’re going to win. If you’re even slightly familiar with supporting a capricious sports team, you’ll understand how excruciating the interval between Stage Two and Stage Three can be. Your heart sinks a million times over between Stage Two and Stage Three. You could write a PhD thesis on unrequited Stage Twos. For this team in particular, you could make a sitcom and call it Australian Stage Threes That Never Made It.
It isn’t Stage Three until the target is less than a run a ball, I tell myself.
I fixate on the run-ball ticker at the bottom of my screen. Each ball passes like a decade. Yet, Marsh especially, looks blissfully unbothered. He is, not indelicately, playing the innings of his life here. Even when Warner has his stumps splattered by Boult to make it 66 off 46 with a new batter in, it relieves me that the incoming Glenn Maxwell has Marsh down the other end.
Marsh lines up to take all six deliveries from Sodhi’s third over while Maxwell finds his feet. He smacks the hide off the second ball so hard over long-on for six that it spooks Sodhi into bowling a nine-ball over. Sixteen runs come off it. Maxwell watches the whole show without having to take strike once. Marsh’s attack allows Maxwell to feel his way into the match. By the time he does, he has taken four boundaries off Milne and Southee.
It’s 24 off 24. Stage Three, here I come.
New Zealand’s last throw of the dice ought to be Boult. He has two wickets for eight off his three overs so far. It is Boult. It has to be.
Marsh faces him first up. Boult bowls fast and full and brilliantly. A good batter probably just about digs this out and is happy to have survived it. Marsh, though, back leg setup and all, spots the length and, as if on autopilot, swings through the ball with a powerful drive. There’s a loud crunch on contact, the ball whistles down the ground, and Maxwell scampers back for two.
22 off 23. Less than a run a ball.
Stage Three, at long last.
The Win Predictor, a tool that has come unstuck so horrendously and so often at the hands of this Australian team in the last six years, says they’re 98% to become world champions.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the batters’ individual scores for the first time in a while.
Marsh has moved on to 63 not out.
It’s four to win off eight, Southee into Maxwell.
There was a terrifying scare earlier in this over when Marsh swung for the fences down the ground, and the dropping ball only just missed Neesham’s dive at long-off. Had that gone to hand, it would’ve been 11 from 11, with a new batter in, and totally Not Stage Three anymore.
But here we are, one hit away.
One thing I love about cricket is, if you delete from your mind the experience of ever having watched a slow motion replay, it’s a wonderfully rapid, borderline chaotic sport. Even if you’ve watched top level cricket in person over and over, it’s quite astonishing how many things happen so quickly sometimes.
So it goes here.
As Southee releases the ball, Maxwell makes a stutter step towards the bowler but realises the ball is coming at him slower than he expects. Throwing his weight forward is no good now; the ball is going to stick in the surface. So he does the thing he’s best at.
He improvises.
He switches the direction of his bat in an instant, ready to reverse-swat the thing behind square on the off-side. The ball reaches him so slowly that, despite setting up incorrectly to begin with, re-mapping his options, and then acting decisively, he’s still too early on the stroke. He doesn’t catch it cleanly. It’s just as well, though, because the bad connection makes it unsaveable.
As the ball skips off to the left of short third and towards the boundary, Marsh at the non-striker’s end is the first person to realise that Australia have won the World Cup.
A fraction of a second later, I’m among the millions of people around the world who are the joint-second people to realise the same thing. I jump up out of my chair, largely in relief that it’s over.
People can say what they like about them being Tosstralia, but no one can ever take this away from them now.
When my eyes meet the screen in front of me, there’s the back of Maxwell’s head, still turned in the direction of the ball. His batting helmet, from behind, is the first visual I see.
The neck guard appended to the bottom of his helmet catches my eye.
There’s a line doing the rounds in Australian men’s cricket these days. I think it started as a serious statement but has become something of a witticism through overuse.
Old blokes win things.
Whichever side of that line you stand, it certainly applies to this Australian team.
Of the team that started the final, Pat Cummins, at twenty-eight years old, is the youngest. Adam Zampa is twenty-nine, Josh Hazlewood is thirty, Marsh and Mitchell Starc are thirty-one, Marcus Stoinis and Steven Smith are thirty-two, Matthew Wade and Maxwell are thirty-three, Finch is thirty-four, and Warner is thirty-five.
There’s one more name I desperately want to add to this list.
One more name, I want to say, who is thirty-two, and turns thirty-three in two weeks.
This is Phil Hughes’ generation.
Much like the 2021 T20 World Cup champions, Australia’s 2015 ODI World Cup winners played some wonderful cricket. With them, though, it forever seemed that there was something greater at stake. In the event, on an electric finals day at a packed home stadium, they powered past the line, riding a swell of emotion that seemed to engulf the entire sport for a while. It was a victory, in every way, for the memory of Phil Hughes.
Sunday night felt different. On a flat night in a largely deserted stadium, Australia were troubled for stretches but, ultimately, swaggered past the line. Their run at this tournament, in many ways, is an odd one to process. They were laughably nervous against South Africa in their first match. They got utterly dismantled by England in group play. There was no little drama in their final day qualification into the semi-finals, decided as it was by net run rates. It’s nearly impossible to think that they could’ve won this tournament had they not chased in the semi-final and the final. It’s fair to say that they’re unlikely champions, and that no one truly regards them as the best in the world.
But something at the core of this team goes beyond all that.
They’re freakishly talented and obviously flawed as players. They’re prone to doubt now and then but willing to throw punches left and right anyway. They’re fighting for their share against bigger, better teams without ever taking a backward step.
To the tiniest detail, they’re a team very much in Phil Hughes’ image. And while the relentless mill of international cricket will move on quickly from this tournament just as it did after 2015, perhaps, in time, there will come an occasion to reflect on this Australian class of 2021.
It is for that occasion that I want to earmark this moment now for what it meant to me.
A victory for the spirit of Phil Hughes.
