Nearly two years after the death of cricketer Phillip Hughes, his teammate and friend, Australia’s vice-captain, David Warner, cannot bring himself to relive that fateful moment.
A young man with a tremendous gift, Hughes was handed the unenviable task of filling the shoes of the great Australian opening batsman, Matthew Hayden. At just 20, twin centuries away to South Africa marked his ascent and garnered him the moniker “The Little Don”. While he flitted in and out of the Test side, the nation took Hughes to its heart, and when he was killed by a cricket ball while batting for South Australia against New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground, the outpouring of grief reverberated around the cricketing world.
The simplicity of “Put out your bats” and the homemade tributes to “63 not out” – his score when he was killed – spoke not just to the respect for a quiet, determined young cricketer but the central place of this sport in the Australian collective imagination – and the sharp shock on seeing one so talented taken just as he returned to the top of his craft.
There is a contrast in the beautiful tributes of two years ago, and the rancour and complication of this week’s coronial inquest into Hughes’ death.
In compelling witnesses – teammates, opponents, umpires on the pitch the day Hughes was fatally struck – the coronial process necessarily forces many to relive and re-confront perhaps the most distressing moment of their lives.
In a statement for the state coroner’s inquest, Warner wrote: “I have been, and am, reluctant to view the footage of what happened that day in November 2014.”
“I believe it will be distressing for me. It has taken me a long time to process the loss of Phil … I have tried not to think about the accident too much but attempted to remain positive and think about the good times Phil and I shared.”
For the family – father Greg, mother Virginia, sister Megan and brother Jason – it’s a harrowing imposition. With emotions of grief, of anger, of shock still raw and evident throughout the inquest, the Hughes family were asked over five days to prepare themselves, to brace themselves and to subject themselves to the public examination and dissection of their darkest tragedy.
They arrived with their own box of tissues, placed at their feet throughout, at times shaking their heads, at times snorting in derision at the evidence of witnesses.
When counsel assisting Cricket Australia, Bruce Hodgkinson SC, offered his final submission, in which he asked the state coroner, Michael Barnes, not to be swayed by “unsworn and unsubstantiated evidence”, Hughes’s parents walked out of the inquest. His siblings, Megan and Jason, who remained then laughed derisively at Hodgkinson’s assertion that “bonds of mateship were on display from the moment Phillip was injured”.
Many have questioned the utility of or necessity for a coronial inquest, and indeed in the face of such upset it remains hard to locate positives.
“This inquest is being convened to explore whether [the death of Phillip Hughes] could have been avoided,” said Barnes in his opening remarks.
“The way the game was controlled; the urgency of the response to Mr Hughes’s injuries; and the adequacy of the protective equipment worn by batsmen will be examined. These inquiries are not undertaken to lay blame – quite clearly the death was a terrible accident – but that doesn’t mean cricket can’t be made safer.”
Not to blame but to understand. An inquisitorial not an adversarial process – no one person or parties stand accused, and no jury waits in judgment.
But calm methodical examination is not often the chosen bedfellow for anger. And rigorous clarification of minutiae is not the harbinger of the “explosive” revelations in which some within the media trade.
On day one of the inquest, counsel assisting the coroner, Kristina Stern SC, called neurosurgeon Prof Brian Owler, a former president of the Australian Medical Association, and forensic pathologist Prof Johan Duflou to examine the medical evidence.
Seven seconds after Hughes was struck by a ball from New South Wales bowler Sean Abbott he fell motionless to the ground. Within 15 seconds one of the players had carefully removed his helmet and he was rolled onto his side. Within 42 seconds the home-team doctor, Dr John Orchard, and the visiting physio, John Porter, arrived to render assistance. An intensive care specialist, Dr Tim Stanley, who had happened by chance to be in the crowd that day, also rushed to tender medical assistance.
An independent review of Hughes’s death, commissioned by Cricket Australia and conducted by David Curtain QC, was released in May this year with this conclusion:
Subject to the coronial inquiry, I am of the opinion that the attention received by Phillip after being struck had no role whatsoever on his subsequent demise, due to the nature and severity of his injury.
In my opinion Phillip’s death was occasioned by a blow to the back of the neck in the vicinity of the vertebrae, below the helmet line, such blow being received at considerable force, and having the effect of causing a traumatic basal subarachnoid haemorrhage.
In plain English, a cricket ball killed Hughes – irrespective of the treatment subsequently rendered to the stricken player.
By necessity of process however, the counsel assisting the state coroner still sought answers to remaining lines of inquiry.
Was there an “ungentlemanly” or unduly aggressive aspect to NSW’s play or a specific targeting of Hughes with the short-pitched delivery? Was there a delay in an ambulance arriving at the Sydney Cricket Ground, due to either procedural faults by staff at the venue or within NSW Ambulances? Was there confusion regarding roles and responsibilities between Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground staff and Cricket Australia/NSW that may have delayed the arrival of medical assistance?
And so, through the calling of witnesses, the collection of statements – both from players and umpires – it was rigorously examined whether or not an unduly antagonistic approach by the NSW team against Hughes in particular was in any way a contributing factor to his untimely death.
Over the first two days of the inquest players present during the match such as Abbott, Brad Haddin, Warner, Bollinger and Hughes’s batting partner Tom Cooper offered testimony.
Abbott did not recall any instructions to target Hughes or any sledging that day, and said “the game that day was being played within the laws and spirit of cricket”.
Haddin recalls, “In terms of banter on the pitch, there was no real banter”, with Warner relating, “My recollection of the day is that it was just an ordinary game of first-class cricket. Phil was comfortable at the crease and playing well.”
Cooper’s statement said, “It has been suggested to me that Doug Bollinger said to me something like ‘I am going to kill you’ ... It is unlikely that Doug would have said that.”
Cooper’s testimony and Bollinger’s own denying such a sledge is the source of much acrimony between the family and Cricket Australia, and it was in response to the cricketers’ statements that the close friend of Hughes, Matthew Day, submitted his own testimony.
Recalling a conversation held shortly after the news of Hughes’s death, Day asserts that Bollinger recalled “One of my sledges was ‘I am going to kill you’. I can’t believe I said that.”
Having weighed the testimony presented both by players and umpires, as well as that tendered by Day, Stern recommended that coroner Barnes make no finding regarding the role that sledging played in the lead-up to the accident.
“It’s unnecessary,” Stern said. “It will be my submission that the evidence your honour has heard is such that there is no evidence that any comments that day in any way exacerbated the risk of injury to Phillip Hughes.”
Both Hughes’s father Greg and brother Jason had also expressed concerns to Simon Taufel, the five-time world cricket umpire of the year asked by the coronial inquest to review the match footage, about the excessive use of the short-pitched delivery against Phillip.
“Based on watching the entire day’s play … I can say that in my opinion, the umpires applied the playing conditions and laws in relation to short-pitched and dangerous bowling extremely well,” Taufel stated.
“From the identified and categorised 23 bouncers bowled that day, I can conclude that only one bouncer that was bowled was incorrectly judged as not being subject to a bowler warning.
“With the amount of training and skill development of batsman at first-class and representative levels in the game, the vast majority of players are capable of handling bouncers. In my 23 years of experience, 13 years at international level, I have only had cause on one occasion in a Test match to speak to a bowler regarding repetitive bouncers where I felt the batsman was likely to be injured.”
That the testimony regarding sledging presented by Day stands in stark contradiction to statements by Bollinger, Haddin, Cooper, Abbott and Warner, as well as the umpires on duty, raises legitimate grievances for the family.
In an especially colourful exchange during final submissions the counsel assisting the Hughes family, Greg Melick SC, asserted that “inconsistencies” in witness testimonies was tantamount to “fabricating evidence”, accusations Hodgkinson strongly refuted, and Melick later retracted.
“At the end of the day, there was a plan,” Melick said. “There was sledging, and short balls were bowled at Phillip Hughes.”
That such a deterioration between the Hughes family and the governing body has come about is a sad development and one exacerbated heavily no doubt by the coronial process.
In seeking to discover whether cricket can “be made safer”, however, the purpose of the inquest extends beyond Hughes and the circumstances surrounding his death.
When Barnes hands down his findings later this month there are likely to be recommendations that stand to benefit the health and safety of countless Australian cricketers – recommendations ascertained through the process of this inquest.
Concrete examples of changes enacted subsequent to the death of Hughes have already emerged.
Cricket Australia says it is in consultation with the British Standards Institution about helmet design, flagging the possible incorporation of a lower grill that extends behind the jawline – protecting the area in which Hughes was struck – providing it can do so without limiting player movement.
The implementation of morning medical briefings before Sheffield Shield matches, detailing clear lines of responsibility for ambulance liaison; the addition of defibrillators and an assigned paramedic on site at every cricket match; the formulation of a formal concussion and head injury policy by Cricket Australia and a Players and Officials Emergency Management plan by the Sydney Cricket & Sports Ground Trust are all changes enacted subsequent to that terrible event in November 2014.
The extent to which measures such as these are regarded as merely litigation-covering exercises or earnest endeavours to prevent a repeat or similar future tragedy may depend upon the relative scepticism or optimism of the beholder.
During the cross examination of Alex Kountouris, a Cricket Australia official, one particular emergency process – instituted subsequent to Hughes’s death – was demonstrated as being unnecessarily cumbersome, with the witness admitting recommendations offered by Stern “would help the process”.
A critical factor in the first ambulance dispatched to attend to Hughes being given a less serious classification, “1C” instead of “1A”, was because the person who made the initial call, an events and operations co-ordinator not even initially present at the stadium, was not able to advise the 000 operator of critical details as to whether the patient was conscious or breathing.
Given the medical circumstances of Hughes’s case this was ultimately immaterial. But it’s very clear to see how an improvement in emergency response processes could be of critical importance in future serious incidents.
For the Hughes family still visibly grieving, wrestling with the injustice of losing a son, brother, a hero, there will be cold comfort in the outcomes of this inquest. Despite all the hurt that it has revisited, the chance that this process might prevent another family from one day facing such a harrowing ordeal is very real. And that’s not nothing.