'We must dig in and get through to tea'

Tomorrow it will be ten years since Phillip Hughes ducked into a bouncer at the SCG, and Australian cricket had its saddest day.

Gideon Haigh wrote a piece for

Cricket Et Al

today about the umpires and referees on who officiated on that day. There’s a section of it that’s really harrowing, the memories of umpire Ash Barrow, and his recount of the first moments after impact:

As players gathered round and removed Hughes’s helmet, Barrow noted blood around the batter’s nose and mouth, probably from his face-forward fall; he saw no mark or swelling on the neck where the ball had struck; he intuited somehow that death, if not already present, was coming to the cricket field.  Players were signalling frantically to the dressing rooms for medical assistance.  He heard their cries of: ‘Ambulance!  Ambulance!’  But Barrow’s instinct was that only a miracle could now save Hughes.  ‘I knew he was gone,’ he says.  ‘Phil never drew breath on the ground. He exhaled a couple of times, but there was nothing going in.’

Read the whole piece

There are already over a thousand of us paying subscribers who have signed up to

Cricket Et Al

for the summer. Gideon and Peter Lalor have quit their newspaper jobs, and are on the road with the tests, sharing match notes, opinions and features on Substack. People should jump on board.

Below is a newsletter I wrote a couple of years ago about Michael Clarke’s eulogy for Phillip Hughes, his teammate and friend. Then it was eight years. This week it is ten. If you’ve never seen the speech, it’s right up there amongst the great sporting eulogies.

Read eulogy on Speakola

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For Phillip Hughes: 'We must dig in and get through to tea', by Michael Clarke - 2014

3 December, 2014, Macksville, NSW, Australia

Phillip Hughes was an Australian Test cricketer who died on the 27th of November 2014 after being struck by a cricket ball in a first class game. It devastated the cricket world — these accidents are impossibly rare, and this was a young and talented man in the prime of life.

The memorial followed on the 3rd of December. Then Australian captain Michael Clarke’s speech was superb, in the most difficult of circumstances.

I’ve never been able to work out if Clarke wrote this himself. It’s such a personal and perfect piece of writing. His delivery is great too, holding it together, but gripping a lectern and clearly struggling with some of the more emotional lines. The one that always gets me relates to the spirit of the man Clarke calls his ‘little brother’ — ‘We must listen to it. We must cherish it. We must learn from it. We must dig in and get through to tea.’

Here’s a bit of a breakdown of the rest of the speech: