My Story

by Michael Clarke

  At this stage, we’re unaware of what is going on in the outside world. Everything has shrunk down to this hospital ward. We don’t know that they have called off the game entirely, as none of the players could bring themselves to go back on the field. Nor do we know that the full round of Sheffield Shield matches around the country, and the Indians’ game in Adelaide, will be abandoned. It’s not the time for cricket. Nor will it be for a long while.

  When Hughesy is taken up to the next floor for more scans, we follow and are put in another waiting room. It’s all a blur. Virginia’s barely able to speak, she’s crying so much. Greg, Hughesy’s dad, is up at his farm near Macksville on the North Coast. Someone has rung to organise him a flight down, but there are no seats out of Coffs Harbour, so the plans have been changed and he’s driving to Port Macquarie to fly from there. The family are worried about him getting misleading news over the car radio or a television in an airport terminal. They just want him here.

  A surgeon comes to us, sits us down, and says, ‘We’ve had the scan results. There’s been a bleed and we’ve got to release the swelling as quickly as possible.’ In order to do so, they have to operate.

  Time dissolves. I don’t know how long has passed. After the surgery, the doctor comes out and tells us the operation hasn’t been able to slow the swelling. Hughesy’s family are suffering intensely, and the doctor isn’t sure that they’re able to take in what he’s telling them.

  ‘Michael,’ he says, ‘can we have a word privately?’

  He wants to take me aside and spell it out, so that I can pass it on to them. He thinks there’s a better chance that they will be able to focus on what I’m saying. The swelling’s going up, he explains.

  I keep asking, ‘Can you give me more information?’ I am feeling kind of clear on the outside, but completely empty within, like what he’s saying is just echoing around inside me. I need to hear it more than once before I can comprehend it.

  The doctor tells me that there is a lot of swelling in Hughesy’s brain, and they need to release it. They will operate again, and then place him in an induced coma.

  After a few more hours of waiting, we jump to our feet as the doctor reappears. He says the news is better. ‘The swelling has slowed down, which is a good sign. We’re going to keep him in the coma overnight and see how much more it comes down. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, but won’t know much until the morning.’

  By now it is eight or nine in the evening, about six hours since Hughesy was hit. Inside the waiting room, Greg has arrived and the family go through periods of quiet. Outside, the corridors are silent. I pace up and down the corridor outside Hughesy’s room for hours. Hughesy’s manager, James Henderson, and Dr Peter Brukner from Cricket Australia are there, but everyone else has been kept out and there’s an eerie stillness.

  At about 3.30 am, I find my car and drive home. I’m only thinking, Will he be right to play cricket again? That’s all. I’m still focused on cricket, nothing bigger than that. The next piece of information, that’s what I’m looking to. Maybe it will tell us that he will be right for the Test match.

  I lie on my bed, and my mind is still squirrel-wheeling around in this little circle. Will he be okay for the Test match? If not, will he be right for the Second Test? I’m not reflecting on Hughesy and our friendship. That would be like allowing too much in. I can only focus on what the doctors will tell us tomorrow morning.

  Trying to sleep is pointless. At 5.30 am, I’m back in the car. At St Vincent’s, Hughesy’s family are where I left them, going through lulls in between bouts of crying.

  It’s mid-morning when a doctor comes in and tells us there’s been a change since the optimistic news last night. They can’t control the swelling, and have increased his medication. We don’t know what to do or say. But every piece of news that doesn’t say, He’ll be okay, he’ll be playing again soon, is shattering.

  After staying with the family for a while, I go back in and see him. Last night, his face was swelling up but he was still recognisable, still Hughesy. Now, in the morning, he’s much more puffed up.

  The nurses are lovely, moving about the room quietly and doing everything with care. To one of them I say, ‘Where’s he at now?’

  She explains that the swelling has now gone up to about five times normal and they have stopped monitoring it.

  This is the first time I look back at him and see that it isn’t him. He is still breathing, through the tube feeding oxygen into his mouth, but it isn’t him. He doesn’t have that typical warm Hughesy sweat across his forehead and cheeks, like he had yesterday. The beat of his heart and the flow of oxygen – it’s like the machine is doing it, keeping him alive, more than his own body is.

  I stay in the room with him for a fair while. Hours. I just hold his hand and urge him to come back to us. Am I saying goodbye? No. I’m fogged-up by shock, just saying the same encouraging words over and over again. If I move off from that topic, I talk about cricket: how he’s going to play in the Test match, how I’ve lost my battle with CA, but we’re going to get justice because Hughesy’s going to go out there as my replacement and score a hundred. No, a double-hundred.

  Later, we will be told that on impact, in that split second when the ball hit him, he was effectively gone. I won’t be able to accept that. That’s too tough for me to take. Right through that first afternoon and evening in hospital, for all the hours I’ve been talking to him, I’ve never let anything like this filter into my head. It’s only cricket. He might be out of the game for a few weeks. But he can’t die.

  I know what my friendship with Phillip Hughes was. Over the days following his passing, my role as Australian captain overlapped with my personal grief at losing one of my best mates. It was hard to separate the two. Managing the scene in the hospital, bringing players together, giving a eulogy at his funeral, and then, after long negotiations, taking the field in a Test match two weeks later – I had no chance to retreat into my private space and grieve for the bloke I regard as my little brother.

  Like many in Sydney’s grade cricket scene, I had heard about Phil Hughes before I met him. In 2006, Neil D’Costa was getting an earful about this prodigious left-hander from the North Coast from one of the young Western Suburbs players, Shariful Islam. Shariful was an under-age representative cricketer who raved non-stop about how Phil Hughes was the best batsman he’d ever bowled to and was going to play for Australia. There’s a story that in a New South Wales under-17s dressing room, the boys were asking each other how many centuries they’d made in their careers. One guy would say two, another would say five, another would say six, and then they’d get to Hughesy and he’d mumble, almost embarrassed, ‘Seventy.’ Up the North Coast, he was already a legend.

  Neil made inquiries about getting Phil to the Magpies, and won out against some other Sydney clubs who were on the trail. I didn’t know this, but one of the attractions of Western Suburbs for Hughesy was that I was playing there, and he wanted to play with me. This was a bit embarrassing for me. At the time, I had been playing for Australia for three years and had the full Shane Warne-inspired look of blond-tipped hair and an earring. Phil had gone to a hairdresser in Coffs Harbour with a photo of me, saying he wanted the same hair. Over the years, the story – like my haircut! – only made me cringe. But Hughesy, with his typical mischief, loved to play it up for all it was worth.

  He still had a year of high school to finish in Sydney, and Neil got him enrolled at Homebush Boys’ High. I was living in my townhouse at Breakfast Point, near Concord on the Parramatta River, and a bunch of other Wests players, including Hughesy, would also soon be living in that development. Neil brought Phil along to my place, and immediately he clicked with all the boys.

  My mates became his mates. Steve Phillips was my best mate at the time, and Lloyd Andrews had been a friend of mine since junior cricket. They became Hughesy’s inner circle, along with Daniel Smith, the New South Wales state right-hander and wicketkeeper. Steve and Hughesy were
very, very similar: they spoke similarly and enjoyed the same things off the field, be it watching rugby league, sharing opinions or socialising. Steve had a big brother relationship with Hughesy, but associating with older guys was something that came naturally to this boy. That probably came from the time he had spent up in Macksville with Greg and Jason, who were his real heroes, and the desire to learn from his elders also reflected his ambition to get ahead in the game.

  He was cheeky and instantly lovable, though what left the deepest impression on me was how serious he was about his cricket and how determined he was to play for Australia. I had never seen that in any young cricketer, that depth of hunger. Nobody I have known has valued the baggy green more than Hughesy, and it was apparent from the first day we met.

  Although I was not playing a lot of grade cricket by that point, when I was around, Hughesy watched me like a hawk. He wanted to imitate my preparation down to the last detail. He asked a lot of questions and listened hard to the answers, reminding me of the way I used to grill Ricky Ponting and Damien Martyn. I was an obsessive worker in my preparation for cricket, particularly in that period when I had had to rebuild my approach to the game after being dropped by Australia in the 2005–06 season. Whether it was gym work-outs, hitting balls or the full range of practice drills, I felt that I had to get a certain amount of work into me before I was properly prepared to play.

  Hughesy adopted this fully. It was a big part of his later relationship with Justin Langer as Australian batting coach. For players like us, there is almost no such thing as too much preparation. We were always competing in training, over who was fitter and stronger. I couldn’t compete with Hughesy’s strength – with that arse and legs, he was such a pocket rocket. So we weren’t competing directly, just trying to push each other.

  Hughesy hit the state scene with a blast in 2007–08, and my first state game with him was the Shield final that season, against Victoria at the SCG. He made a hundred, of course. They tried to bounce him, and he’d cut and pull them away. They bowled spin, and he hoicked them over mid-wicket. He drove them spare. His celebration was the biggest anyone could remember and, not for the last time, when I saw him make a hundred it felt as sweet as if I had made it myself.

  In the New South Wales dressing room, we were Wests boys. To me, he was always the young country kid playing for Western Suburbs. I wanted to help him in his cricket, and look after him as a big brother in the way Shane Warne had looked after me. Tours are special. With more time on your hands, you get to know each other in a more relaxed, distraction-free way than when you are at home. On tour, Hughesy and I would get together every night, just as I’d done with Warney.

  The first opportunity to consolidate our friendship in that way came in 2009, when he was picked to tour South Africa with the Australian team, as the opening batting replacement for the retiring Matthew Hayden. That was a huge pair of shoes for Hughesy to fill, but he slipped into life as an Australian Test cricketer as if he was born for it. He was happy and natural and never overawed. Even when the South Africans got him out fourth ball in his first Test innings in Johannesburg, he just shrugged it off and went out and smacked runs in the second dig. Then, on a really difficult pitch in Durban where the rest of us were struggling against Dale Steyn, he made two incredible hundreds.

  He didn’t need too much personal help from me. He developed friendships with Ricky Ponting and Simon Katich, and in his unique way, he had them thinking he was their personal project. He knew exactly what he needed from each of us. He and I had that Western Suburbs connection, and the common ground in our domestic lives, but Kato loved him as his opening partner. Batting together, they were two stars of that series. When Hughesy ran down the wicket and leapt in the air – after bringing up his first Test hundred with a six! – I had an almost out-of-body experience. I was so excited, I felt like it was me celebrating out there. That’s how much I cared for his success.

  We were always close when we were on tour together over the next two years. After he was dropped during the 2009 Ashes series and became an irregular member of the Australian team, we were speaking on the phone or texting every day. Hughesy always went back to state cricket and churned out more runs, making his case for reinstatement. He came back into the team as a replacement in January 2010 and stayed with us when we toured New Zealand that autumn, but when it came time to leave a batsman out, the selectors always seemed to find it easiest to omit Hughesy.

  I can’t say why, as I wasn’t a selector at the time, but my guess is that it was two things. One, Hughesy’s unorthodox-looking technique always gave the selectors a story they could tell him: that he should work on his leg-side play, that he should stop trying to score so many runs square of the wicket on the off side, that he should improve his footwork against spin. And two, he was such a good bloke, he never moaned or made a big deal of his disappointment. He would sit down and listen to the selectors’ explanation very closely, then go off and work harder on his game. If we were on tour, as we were when he was dropped during the Ashes tours of England in 2009 and 2013, he would be the first guy running out gloves or Gatorade to the batsmen who had replaced him.

  Which is not to say that he didn’t feel the anguish. He felt it as much as anybody I ever knew. On those England tours, he would come to my hotel room and pour it all out. I could only let him talk and give him broad encouragement about making more runs. It wasn’t for me to complain about the decisions. As a senior player, I couldn’t show disloyalty to the guys who had been chosen in his place. And as his friend, I knew I would only be bringing him down if I grizzled and whinged and said he should have been picked instead of so-and-so. I had to walk a careful line. But Hughesy was always receptive to encouragement, and his record shows his amazingly consistent ability to pick himself up after each disappointment and do exactly what the selectors asked. He was doing it again the day he got hit.

  The year 2010 was a watershed for our friendship. Early in the year, I broke up with Lara and Hughesy dislocated his shoulder in a boxing-gym accident. During that winter, we both needed a friend more than ever. Hughesy came to stay at my unit in Bondi for a night, and ended up staying for six weeks. We went out together, exercised together, talked non-stop, and picked up each other’s spirits. His shoulder, and my heart, got put back together. We became as close as brothers that year, although the one part of our lives we couldn’t share was Hughesy’s addiction to caffeine. I didn’t drink coffee, and he would guzzle it from dawn through to well after dark. He was on his own there.

  When I became Australian captain, our friendship shifted again. It became tighter, but I was more careful in letting people see it, because I didn’t want Hughesy to carry the burden of being seen as the captain’s favourite. In Sri Lanka in 2011, my first Test tour as captain, Hughesy scored his third Test century, an extremely gutsy innings in Colombo. When he passed his hundred, I promise to God it was like I was in the middle raising my bat.

  That’s how I’d felt when Hughesy scored his hundreds in Durban two years earlier, but the difference now was that I had that same experience with other young guys. Shaun Marsh also made his maiden Test century on that tour, and later that summer David Warner would do likewise. The ‘Hughesy’ feeling I had always had – of genuinely getting as much pleasure out of my teammates’ achievements as I’d ever got out of my own – was now extended to all of the other players, especially the young ones coming through.

  Unfortunately, Hughesy was out of the team four Tests later, after a couple of failures against New Zealand. He was back in again the next summer, making two half-centuries against Sri Lanka before working his butt off in our 4–0 loss in India. On the 2013 Ashes tour, we really did believe he had cemented his place with his unbeaten 81 alongside Ashton Agar in their world record last-wicket partnership at Trent Bridge. This was a new side of Hughesy, the old head batting with the teenager, saying nothing to Ashton between deliveries except ‘Next ball, next ball’. He was strongly influenced by our
batting coach Justin Langer, another hard little nut.

  One Test match later, though, the selectors dropped Hughesy for what turned out to be the last time. He was the victim of a chain reaction of circumstances. Darren Lehmann, newly installed as coach and selector, was determined to give Shane Watson and Chris Rogers a few chances as our opening pair. Ed Cowan was pushed down to number three and Hughesy to number six for the Trent Bridge Test match, so we had effectively four openers in our top six. Ed got sick during the match and missed out with the bat; he was replaced by Usman Khawaja for the next Test match at Lord’s. We got beaten comprehensively there, with none of the batsmen making any notable contribution.

  For the Third Test at Old Trafford, David Warner was returning from his disciplinary suspension, which he followed with some games for Australia A in Africa. The selectors felt it would be unfair to drop Usman after one Test match, in which he had made a second-innings fifty. They wanted to rush Davey back in, as we were 2–0 down in the series. Steve Smith had done enough to hold on to his number five spot. Darren Lehmann said that he felt, deep down, that Hughesy was an opener, not a middle-order batsman, but at the time he was backing Watson and Rogers as the opening pair. So it ended up that the short straw, as usual, went to Hughesy.

  He came to my hotel room, fuming. I was in a tricky situation. I wasn’t a selector anymore, having given up that role at the start of the tour. All the same, I had to take accountability for the selectors’ decisions as if they were my own. When I had been a selector, in a way it had been easier. I could look Hughesy in the eye, as I would with any other player, and say, ‘We had to drop you, so we did.’ This time, I couldn’t quite own the decision like that, but I couldn’t afford to disagree with it either. I never said to Hughesy, ‘You should have been picked.’ I made it clear to the selectors if I disagreed with them, but I didn’t take that to the player.