Phillip Hughes was born in the wrong era.
When Hughes made his Test debut at just 20 years old in February 2009, Australia’s men’s Test team was in flux and floundering.
Just a few years earlier, the Aussies were pitted against a World Test XI and won — they were that good.
In that stretch from 2001 to 2008, the team led by Matthew Hayden, Justin Langer, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath lost just one of 25 Test series.
But in the space of 12 months, all bar Ponting retired, including, pivotally, the opening pair Hayden and Langer.
Selectors were desperately retooling almost the entire team when a 19-year-old Hughes became the youngest player to score a century in the Sheffield Shield final.
His second-innings 116 against Victoria in 2008 told the country what anyone in the know already knew. This kid was special.
Phillip Hughes was irrepressible on a cricket pitch — his century and spectacular catches in the 2008 Sheffield Shield final pointed to future success. ( Getty Images: Cameron Spencer)
Eleven months later, with another ridiculous Shield season under his belt — 891 runs and four tons from 13 innings — and he was in the Test team for the tour of South Africa.
“I was actually in the house with him when he got the call,” Hughes’s brother, Jason, says in the documentary The Boy From Macksville, which aired on Seven and Fox on Friday night.
“Then he got off the phone, threw the phone up in the air and said ‘I’m going to South Africa’. We sort of did a little bit of a dance.
“I was just happy for him because, like seriously, it’s a big effort.”
The elation of that call was tempered when his first innings lasted four balls and ended with one of the ugliest dismissals you will ever see in the first over of a Test, wildly trying and failing to get on top of a Dale Steyn bouncer with his favourite cut shot.
But three innings later, facing the might of Steyn, Morne Morkel, Makhaya Ntini and Jacques Kallis on their turf, Hughes smacked his first 350 Test runs, including twin centuries in just his second Test.
It was an arrival befitting the mythical aura he had had coming up through the junior ranks in the country, grade, first-class and now international cricket.
Morkel and Steyn, not appreciating getting clattered by this audacious young Aussie, started bouncing him.
“I was batting with him. Morkel and Steyn had a crack at him … It started to get a bit heated,” Ponting says in the documentary.
“On one particular occasion, Morkel had something to say to him and I went down to him and just looked at him and said ‘how are you going with this?’. He looked at me and said ‘I f***ing love it, mate’.
Morne Morkel (left) did his best to get to Phil Hughes on the South African tour of 2009, but Hughes thrived and produced big runs for Australia. (Getty Images: Hamish Blair)
“That would have been the toughest fast bowling he faced … and he got through it with a big smile on his face once again.”
Somehow, three Tests later — one more in South Africa and two in England — Hughes was axed.
“Selectors at that time were horrible, let’s be clear on that,” Usman Khawaja said of the decision to drop Hughes two Tests into the 2009 Ashes series.
“I just could not believe they dropped him at that time. The most short-sighted thinking.
“‘His technique is not up to standard’. What do you mean? He’s scored the most runs of anyone in the world in the last year.
Phillip Hughes (left) was a contemporary of Steve Smith (right) and David Warner. (Getty Images: Hamish Blair)
“He got screwed over a little bit then and it definitely hurt his psyche.”
It became an unfortunate trend for Hughes.
“He was the one that for some reason always got dropped first,” Matthew Wade says.
Justin Langer remembers being “incredibly disappointed he got dropped”.
“That said, you look back in the history of Australian cricket, they all get dropped,” he said.
And Hughes always responded to getting axed the only way he knew how; with mountains of runs.
Shield, English county, short-form, Australia A and anywhere else you might like, he would score so many centuries to the point his selection for Australia was undeniable, get picked, failed to have immediate success, get dropped again.
He missed the start of the 2009/10 summer, was drafted in as Simon Katich’s injury replacement for the fifth of six Tests, then went out again. Two months later, he stepped in for the injured Shane Watson in New Zealand, blasted an unbeaten 86 as Australia won the first Test, but was out for the second once Watson’s hip healed.
His own weight of runs, injuries to his contemporaries and Australia’s inability to patiently work towards consistency on the Test scene meant Hughes’s reintroduction to the team was spasmodic to say the least.
He scored the last of his three Test centuries at the end of a tour of Sri Lanka. He was still only 22 years old. For context, Nathan McSweeney last month made his Test debut at 25.
Hughes was dropped for a year between December 2011 and 2012, but scored 80s in Johannesburg, Hobart, Sydney and Nottingham.
The last — an unbeaten 81 when he was squeezed into the team out of position at number six — was overshadowed by Ashton Agar’s 98 on debut at number 11.
Phillip Hughes’s last big knock for Australia came in the Ashes Test at Trent Bridge in 2013. (Getty Images: Ryan Pierse)
A duck and two 1s in his next two innings, and Hughes got the word he would be replaced by David Warner for the third Test. Again, Khawaja was incredulous when he told him.
“Hughesy, you scored 80 two games ago, they can’t drop you. Who are they gonna bring in?” he said.
Khawaja was wrong. They dropped Hughes for the third Test of the 2013 Ashes and he never made it back into the side.
Cruelly, he was right on the verge of returning when he was fatally hit by a bouncer in a Sheffield Shield game on November 25, 2014.
“I wasn’t gonna be available for the first Test match [against India] and Hughesy was gonna be the one to come in for me,” then-captain Michael Clarke said.
The timing was too cruel to be real. But of course, Hughes was a man in the wrong era.
Had he been born 20 years earlier, without the forensic analysis of his technique, he would have been a beloved country larrikin nailed into the Test set-up for a decade. Five years later and he would have had more freedom to play his way.
Watching footage of him flaying attacks in The Boy From Macksville, it’s impossible to look at him clear his front foot and slap some combination of a tennis forehand and a baseballer’s line drive and not see Steve Smith crashing boundaries in the 2019 Ashes.
When he clears the mid-wicket rope with a furious slash across the line of the stumps, you can see a leftie Glenn Maxwell.
And his furious cut shots and slashing cover drives. It’s Travis Head.
Phillip Hughes’s attacking play and slashing cover drives remind us of current Test batsman Travis Head. (Getty Images: Hamish Blair)
“Heady is as close to Hughesy that I’ve seen,” Khawaja said.
“They’re both very similar; the worse the wicket gets, the more in the game they are because they just start flaying away and they put a lot of pressure back on the bowlers.”
Hughes was a mentor to Head when they teamed up in South Australia. He was, after all, five years older. But, 10 years after his death at the age of 25, while a 30-year-old Head has emerged as a mainstay of the Test team, Hughes will always feel like the younger man.
As if the incident itself wasn’t cruel enough, the extra twist of the knife is that it makes it almost impossible to talk about Hughes without mentioning his untimely passing.
Hughes was born in 1988, between NSW contemporaries Warner and Smith. It’s impossible not to think about what could have, and should have, been.
“The cricket world didn’t see the best of Hughesy. He captured the attention on so many occasions but it was act one,” former Test opener Ed Cowan said.
“Who was the best cricketer of those three [at the time]? Phil Hughes by far.
“Steve Smith has become a generational player, one of Australia’s greatest-ever Test batters. Dave Warner has become one of Australia’s greatest three-format players and a generational player.
Phil Hughes’s death united the cricket world in grief — but the documentary shows there is so much to celebrate about his life and career before that day in November 2014. (Getty Images: Paul Kane)
“Well, Hughesy was that and something.
“You can only speculate, but my gut tells me that he would have ended a cricket career with statistics in excess of those two and been potentially the best cricketer of that generation.”
The documentary spends only the last few minutes focusing on the tragedy.
For some cricket fans, watching Hughes highlights is still painful.
But, removed from the horror of what happened on that SCG pitch in 2014, the joy of that boy from Macksville is still infectious. And feeling it once again is a welcome relief.
