Phillip Hughes mourned by friends and family at home town funeral

Phillip Hughes did not want to play his first game of cricket.

But his older brother Jason’s under-10’s team was short a player, and Phillip, only seven, was shanghai-ed in under veiled threats he would be a “wuss” if he didn’t.

He was sent in at the bottom of the order – for surely the last time – and made 25. A love affair with the game was born.

The improbable, irresistible cricketing career of Phillip Hughes, begun that day, was ended last week.

He was felled by a bouncer on Tuesday while batting in a Sheffield Shield game at the SCG, and never regained consciousness. Hughes was 25 years old, five days short of his 26th birthday. He was 63 not out.

His captain and friend, Michael Clarke, choked back tears as he spoke of a late-night visit this week to the wicket at the SCG, “those same blades of grass” he and Hughes had shared as teammates.

Clarke, alone on this night, looked around the empty stands that once held the crowds that cheered Hughes’s eccentric range of shots.

Clarke stared at the fences once battered by his teammates’ bludgeonings.

“I stood at the wicket, I knelt down to touch the grass, and I could sense he was here with me, telling me ‘we’ve got to dig in, to get through to tea’ … before passing on a useless fact about cows, and then swaggering back to the end, grinning at the bowler and calling me through for a run in a booming voice.”

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While Hughes’s immense cricketing gifts brought him to the nation’s, and the world’s, attention, his funeral heard mostly of his life away from the wicket: the big baby dubbed ‘buffon’ by a grandfather who thought he was chunky; the young boy obsessed with catching a legendary giant fish said to inhabit the Nambucca river; the teenager surprised and disappointed to learn that a school called “Homebush Boys” didn’t have any female students; the aspiring cattleman never happier than at work on the farm.

Hughes’s life in Macksville was a classical country upbringing.

But the element that stood the Hughes story apart from the archetypal country boy’s was his obsession with the game of cricket, and his unswerving drive to be good at it.

The young Hughes demolished all junior records. Aged 12, he made 159 in a representative game in Sydney that got ‘city tongues’ talking. He had 70 centuries to his name by the time he was 17.

But still there were question marks. This was the boy who was told, time after time, by coach after coach, his unorthodox technique would not survive the rigours of first-class cricket.

Hughes was determined to defy the doubters, to prove them wrong by simply making run after run after run. For batsmen, ultimately, there is no other measure.

When Hughes announced himself on the world stage with twin hundreds in only his second Test, there were none who begrudged him his hard-earned success.

And when the runs dried up, Hughes quietly went back and worked harder. He was dropped from the Australian team three times, but each time he came back. He was on the verge of being selected again when tragedy struck last week.

Australians are curiously proprietorial about their Test cricketers. Part of the price of living out that most sacrosanct of Australian dreams is that it must be shared with each of us.

People who have never played a game feel the right, even the obligation, to tell established Test players what they’re doing wrong, why they’re nicking off to second slip, or bowling too many “four-balls”. The Test team is public property.

Phillip Hughes was happier than most to share the fruits – and the tribulations - of his unlikely, sparky career.

It seemed he never forgot being the starry-eyed kid on the other side of the exchange, never lost sight of the privilege it was to play for his country.

But Hughes was not the property of the country whose baggy green cap he wore. He belonged here. He belonged to Macksville.

He belonged to Greg and Virginia, his parents, who nurtured his gifts, though they’d take him from this town to ‘the city’ to be tested at only 17.

He belonged to sister Megan, who idolised her older brother.

He belonged to brother Jason whom he grew up battling in the endless-summer matches of a dozen rural seasons and who read out a letter to Phillip at the service: “I’ll take good care of Dad, Mum, Megan, and, of course, your cows. And I promise to get back on the horse and play the game we both love.”

He belonged to the family farm, where he raised his beloved Angus cattle.

Hughes belonged, too, to those he played with and against: the teammates from Sawtell who this week etched his number in the grass at the oval where they’d shared a premiership, and drank to their fallen comrade.

To the NSW colleagues he dazzled with a century in a Shield final, the youngest player to make such a score, and made in typically unflinching Hughes fashion.

To the Australian teammates that he first stunned with his irrepressible hundreds against the world’s best bowling attack in South Africa, and then impressed with his unstinting graft to improve when the game at that rarefied level became tougher.

But perhaps above all of these, Phillip Hughes belonged to the middle.

Clarke told mourners that, for him, Hughes will always be at the ground where he last batted.

“His spirit has touched it, and it will forever be a sacred ground for me. I can feel his presence there.”

Hughes will be, forever, 63 not out, but “we must play on,” said Clarke.

“Rest in peace my little brother, I’ll see you out in the middle.”