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Till a ball reared off the pitch and claimed Phillips Hughes' life, it would have been impossible to imagine that the death of a relative stranger - Hughes had played only a handful of international matches - could affect so many people so intensely.
A life cut short at 25 is an immense tragedy, and Hughes was a talented, and by all accounts likeable, cricketer on the verge of making a comeback to the national side. But there were powerful factors that accentuated the impact of his accidental death.
Only a handful people were present when it happened, but those included cricketers from the Australian team, who had been with him in the Middle East days before and with whom he would have shared a dressing room with in the coming days. More significantly, the rest of the world could watch it almost minutes later. Photographs were available almost immediately, and though the match was not being televised, it was being recorded, and in a matter of hours the clip of the blow, of Hughes staggering and falling face down, was playing out on television and social media.
Above all, for the cricket community, which included players and fans, there was a sense of horror. Young lives are lost to accidents and to illnesses, but here, in the words of Mark Nicholas, cricketers were confronted with their own mortality on the field of play. It was their beloved game that had claimed one of their own. Cricket is played with a ball that is designed to hurt, and every bouncer is bowled with the knowledge that it can cause bodily harm, but yet the ball is cricket's most intimate object. It is not supposed to kill.
Hughes' injury, it turned out, was a freak one. Only about 100 such have ever been recorded in medical history, and it was only the second instance in cricket. But it raised questions about safety gear, and indeed the legitimacy of the bouncer. The last Australian summer had been about intimidation. Mitchell Johnson, an amiable and till then erratic fast bowler, grew a handlebar moustache and unleashed bouncers of such ferocious accuracy that they broke the English team. From a metrosexual dandy, whom many die-hard Australian fans regarded with a dose of sneering suspicion, Michael Clarke dramatically recast himself in the role of the Ugly Australian. His sledging of James Anderson, broadcast to the cricket world by a turned-up stump microphone - "get ready for a broken f***ing arm" - became the leitmotif of a ruthless 5-0 trouncing of the old enemy. But memories of that triumphant campaign now jarred.
Grief, those who have experienced it will know, is a more profound and powerful emotion than joy, which is uplifting and spreads effortlessly but is also more fleeting. Grief cuts deep and lasts longer, and because it is far more personal, it can be more revealing of human nature.
“Cricketers are heroes, but distant celebrities in India; in Australia they are fellow men living out a common dream. In Hughes, Australians did not merely lose a potential cricket star, but kin
Hughes' death broke Australia free of the stereotypical image of a hard land populated by beer-swigging, tough-talking yet friendly people, to reveal a mellow, sentimental side that frequent travellers to this land have had opportunities to glimpse. No one personified it more than Clarke, who through the course of an emotionally harrowing week became an emblematic figure for Australia's grief, and became, in the eyes of the Australian people, not just the captain of a cricket team but a leader of men.
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