He was hit a few days agoin a State match. He was in a coma and has now died.. He was 25 years old.
This is the third major head injury in the game in a few months. Early in November Pakistan batsman Ahmed Shahzad washit on the head and suffered a skull fracture. English player Stuart Broad was similarly injured in August..
It was a matter of time and it has happened. RIP Hughesy.
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A couple of questions:
The BBC said the ball was a “bouncer” – can you explain what that is? The article seemed to imply that these kinds of pitches are supposed to intimidate the batters. Are these balls supposed to hit the player? Or scare them? If so, why are they necessary?
Secondly, the ball appears to have hit Hughes in the back of the head. Could this be avoided by having larger cricket helmets?
Bugger. A tragedy for all concerned.
The SCG is a pretty good batsman’s pitch at the moment. South Australia were 2-136 after 48 overs when the incident occurred, so it wasn’t a dangerous greentop. Hughes was well set in his innings, the bowler Sean Abbot isn’t considered as express pace. So whatever caused him to misjudge the length and bounce is inexplicable.
If Hughes hadn’t been so quick moving his head he’d probably been struck on the helmet and might well have batted on.
A thoroughly pleasant and well liked bloke.
It was reasonable chance that he’d have been selected in the Australian team for the coming Test match as Michael Clarke is an unlikely starter.
George Summers of Nottinghamshire died after being struck on the head whilst batting at Lord’s in 1870.
Yes a bouncer or short delivery is meant to intimidate the batsman. They also are used a batters may swing at them, nick them and offer an easy catch to the fielders.
It’s tough to say on the helmet as the more coverage you get the less movement the player has.
Just a very sad accident…
A bouncer is a relatively fast ball which arrives at shoulder height after bouncing. Its meant to scare tge batter. Hitting the batsman is perfectly fine in cricket. Especially when he is known to be uncomfortable against such types of balls as Hughes was.
A larger helmet might have saved him. But at the cost of mobility of the head and also sight.
(in cricket the pitch is the surface a game is played on, cricket’s equivalent to a pitch in baseball is a delivery or a ball).
A bouncer is a delivery which bounced about shoulder/head height to the batsman. The actual speed
A well directed short pitched delivery is a legitimate tactic to unsettle a batsman and take their wicket, not necessarily with that delivery, more likely the follow-ups. It’s part of the balance of the game, the equivalent of pitching inside. Intimidation, definitely. Trying to hit/hurt grey area.
Poorly directed short pitched deliveries on the other hand usually present easy scoring opportunities.
Where batsmen more usually get in trouble is if the ball bounces sharply and more than expected. Somehow it seems to rear off the pitch. The batsmen may start to play an attacking shot (as Hughes did) and then realise the problem and not have sufficient time to take evasive action.
Hughes had a unconventional technique that made him look uncomfortable. Steve Waugh, Michael Bevan amongst others who didn’t play the hook shot well looked similarly uncomfortable.
Hughes was opening the batting in 1st grade cricket when he was just 14. Bowlers have been trying to “knock his head off” with short pitched stuff ever since. Yes he looked awkward against the top class fast men when conditions suited them … you know many batsmen who don’t?
Brydon Coverdale profile in Cricinfo nails it.
Yes, he did look and wa uncomfortable as the pasting he got in Tests at the hands of pacers showed.
The thing with the bouncer is that you have to judge the trajectory, apogee, and speed of the ball
. Both Hughes and Ahmed Shahzad were done in by the pace of the ball, they actually overestimated it, both balls were slower than they thought. Moreover, cricket helmets are good against glancing blows. Less so against full on ones. Which is what got Hughes. Shahzad was hit by a medium pacer on a protected area. Got a skull fracture. Same with a quick? Probably fatal.
Bloody sad. A good cricketer and an all round nice bloke. I was at the SCG when he was in the outfield. Spoke to the kids when he could and signed autographs. No tickets on himself at all.
Very sad, you have to feel so very sorry for the bowler as well. That delivery was nothing out of the ordinary and would be repeated thousands of times every weekend to no real ill-effect.
Freakish is the only word. When you have a hard projectile travelling at high speed and bouncing off an unpredictable surface you are going to have injuries and unfortunately some (thankfully very small) amount will be fatal.
The tactic of the bouncer is very well policed these days and there’s no need to fundamentally change it. Helmets are used and I’m sure can evolve to offer even more protection but even so, I don’t think we can ever offer a 100% guarantee.
There is a school of thought that says since the introduction of helmets batsmen have taken on the short ball more often where previously they would watch it and sway away and not try to play a shot. Does that mean they put their head in dangerous situation more often when they *do *misjudge their shots? I don’t know to be honest, sounds plausible but even so I can’t see anyone recommending a return to helmetless batsmen.
It’s no secret that I don’t follow cricket (or football, or any other sport) so initially I became aware of this through headlines while scrolling past to other stories. “Cricketer rushed to hospital after being hit in the head by bouncer”, “Hughes in induced coma after bouncer hit”. So at first I thought this was one of those stories that crop up every fifteen minutes about sportsmen getting into trouble at a pub or club while liquored up and I ignored it.
Later I glimpsed the words “at the SCG” and I wondered what kind of function a cricketer would be bounced from. That’s about the time I decided to read more to see if the bouncer had been charged with anything. A momentary confusion when it became clear to me that the bouncer had hit him in the head during the match (ok, significantly longer than a moment), and I finally realised he’d been hit by a ball, not a security guy. Oops. But for a short while I was trying to make sense of why a bouncer would head onto to the pitch to hit one of the players in the head.
RIP Phil Hughes. I had never heard of him before but my Facebook feed is full of devastated people who reckon he was a top bloke, and 25 is far too young regardless.
Didn’t something almost identical happen to Rockies minor league first base coach Mike Coolbaugh in 2007? He was struck in the head by a line drive that caused massive hemorrhaging from his vertebral artery and died shortly thereafter. The linked BBC article in the OP says Hughes died of vertebral artery dissection. Coolbaugh’s death was a big part of the reason base coaches now have to wear helmets on the field, which is ironic because it seems like that didn’t help Hughes.
Terribly sad and freakish accident. RIP.
This is the theory of risk compensation. It’s also said to apply to cycling with helmets and driving with ABS brakes. It’s also advanced as an explanation for the different tackling styles in American Football vs rugby - the presence of protective gear encourages riskier tackling.
I think it’s quite likely that the helmet both encourages the batsman to play shots and the bowler to bowl at full pace. (Looking back, the risks taken by Thomson, Marshall et al in bowling full pace at batsmen in cloth caps seem unimaginable). It will be interesting to see if there’s any difference in players’ approaches over the next few months.
Certainly tailenders are far more likely to hang around in “modern” cricket because they are so much better off with protective equipment. And so, because they now hang around, they cop as much short pitched stuff as the batsmen and get hit much more often.
Not sure that applies so much with the top order, though it is certainly the case that few batsmen duck under bouncers. My view is that the rise of the one day and T20 format, usually on dead flat tracks has meant batsmen are encouraged to attack the short pitched stuff and their techniques are shoddy and they too often don’t move inside the line before playing the shot.
I remember a Test match in Perth in 1976.
On the fastest deck in world cricket at the time, Australia’s bowlers included Thomson and Lillee, Windies had Roberts and Holding who were all a tad better than the average pie chucker. Against them Ian Chappell got 159 and Roy Fredericks got 146 and I wouldn’t have thought many of those runs came from cover drives. Both Chappelli and Roy batted wearing a cap, and neither changed even after helmets became standard equipment.
While headshots are responsible for traumatic events of these past few days and are more popular and dramatic, the fact is that over shoulder deliveries are actually less dangerous. They are easy to avoid and play for a Test batsman level reflexes and skill. Balls which are about heart height are actually more challenging and cause more injuries, although only two fatal ones, one in 1959 and one last year, both in Pakistan.
Plus in the 1970s’s fast bowlers had bouncers and yorkers and that was it. (Swing was for medium pacers). The modern batsman has to face a much more varied attack.
Quite right. In fact during Hughes innings he had not played any short balls early on and had simply avoided them. The presumption was that he decided to hook or pull to move the run rate along.
I won’t be at all surprised if an autopsy reveals an unknown aneurysm in his ruptured blood vessel led to his death. It seems pretty common that fit sports people die suddenly and it turns out that they have some undetected physical flaw.
My father recently discovered that he has an aortic aneurysm and on asking the doctor what would happen if it burst was told, “Don’t worry you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”
Terrible though it is, I bet if you had offered Phil Hughes the choice of suddenly dying while batting at the SCG, in pretty good touch, almost assured of getting back in the Test team, or many other ways of dying, he would have chosen the way he went.
RIP. The worst part is that he was so young. Only 25, abt to turn 26 this Sunday. Spare a thought for bowler Abbott too. Spectators and fast bowlers (such as Johnson) would never feel the same abt bowling bouncers, sad.
Indias state level cricketer Raman Lamba died after being hit on head, batting w/o helmet.
Nari Contractor was struck on the skull by a Charlie Griffith bouncer in a practice match against Barbados during India’s tour of the West Indies in 1962.
The injury during the pre-helmet era left him unconscious for days and he miraculously survived after multiple operations and blood transfusions. But he could never represent India again.
Desperately, desperately sad. And incredibly unlikely too if this report from Cricinfo is to be believed.
http://www.espncricinfo.com/australia/content/story/803763.html
Only 100 recorded cases of this ever. Only one ever caused by a cricket ball. A terrible and tragic, freakish accident. Of course people will look at helmet design and have a think about the laws and so on but the fact remains that thousands of bouncers are bowled every year in top level cricket and fatalities are still incredibly rare. I hope someone is looking after Abbott as well as Hughes’ family - he must be devastated.
The upcoming Test against the Indians is going to be a very sober occasion, I suspect. Part of me hopes though that Australia bowl first, the ball is tossed to Mitchell Johnson and he can find it in himself to send down a bouncer first ball - the first bouncer is going to be remarked upon, people may even boo it, but it needs to be got out of the way so that they can try and get back to playing cricket as quickly as possible. I agree with Novelty Bobble that the game doesn’t need to change as a result of this. A bit more vigilance and encouraging batsman to evade sometimes rather than play the ball would probably suffice.
CNN on thetype of injury.
Interesting variance with the figures the doctor from CA gave with that CNN report. Maybe he is saying 100 recorded cases ever in sport or something similar? Whatever, it seems an incredibly unlikely thing to happen outside of the stuff that CNN noted - car crashes and similar.