A year after Hughes' death, player safety still a concern

Cricket : The sport has the capacity to do more to protect its purveyors

On November 25 last year, the Australian cricketer Phillip Hughes was attempting to win a recall to the Test team. He had reached 63 during a domestic match in Sydney, when he received a short ball aimed near his head.

Trying to attack the delivery, Hughes was struck on the top of the neck and, after staggering for a few seconds, he collapsed on the field. Within 48 hours he was pronounced dead, three days before his 26th birthday.

Jim Maxwell, a leading sports commentator in Australia, reflected that Hughes was a batsman who “epitomised the spirit of Australian cricket: a boy from the bush, homespun, instinctive and unaffected by the clamour of a monetised sporting life,” according to the Espncricinfo website.

Amid the outpouring of grief, the cricket world could agree upon one thing: that what had befallen Hughes had been a freak accident. Australia’s team doctor, Peter Brukner, told the Australian broadcaster ABC that only about 100 cases had ever been reported of a neck injury causing hemorrhage in the brain and that Hughes’s case had been the only one in cricket.

But dangers on the cricket field are more common than many acknowledge. Cricket has never seriously considered outlawing the bouncer  and it has continued to be deployed by fast bowlers since Hughes’ death.

The Australian quick Mitchell Johnson, who retired earlier this month, told ABC Radio that the death of his former teammate made him question whether “he was doing the right thing” before concluding that the bouncer was “part of the game.” Only baseball rivals cricket when it comes an obsession with statistics. Yet cricket keeps no records of fatalities or major injuries incurred while playing the game. Since the death of Hughes, four more people are believed to have died because of injuries recorded on the cricket field.

Just three days after Hughes’ death, an umpire in Israel was killed by a blow to his jaw after a ball ricocheted off the stumps in a club match. In April, a player in India was killed after an on-field collision with a teammate in another club game. In July a club cricketer in England died after being struck on the chest while batting. On November 20, Raymond van Schoor, a 25-year-old international cricketer for Namibia, was killed by heatstroke incurred in a domestic match in his home country.

Before Hughes, it is believed that no cricket player had been killed in such a high-level match since Abdul Aziz in Pakistan in 1959.  Cricket Australia, the sport’s governing body in that country, cannot be accused of brushing past Hughes’s death. It immediately increased the presence of medical officials at all professional matches and commissioned an independent review of Hughes’ death from the New South Wales state coroner; that report is due soon. All professional players in Australia today must now wear a helmet that meets certain safety standards.

Yet across the rest of the sport, there are concerns that lessons from Hughes’ death have not been absorbed.

“At international level, there has not been much advancement in helmet safety since Phil’s death,” said Tony Irish, the executive chairman of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations (FICA).

While a new safety standard on helmets that offers better protection to the face was agreed upon in Britain in 2013, manufacturers have been slow to adjust.

“It has taken much longer to get helmets credited to the new standard than any of us thought that it would,” said Angus Porter, the chief executive of the Professional Cricketers’ Association. The 2013 safety standard was completed before Hughes’ death, and progress has been limited in getting helmets to cover the back of the neck, where Hughes was fatally hit. Bulk production of helmets that cover the back of the neck will not begin until next year.

Although all countries have signed up to the 2013 British Safety Standard, “it remains unclear what adoption means,” said Irish, who expressed concerns that many players would continue to wear older helmets.

The International Cricket Council, the global governing body, has left enforcement up to individual countries; only Australia has made wearing helmets that adhere to the 2013 Safety Standard compulsory, although the England and Wales Cricket Board is likely to follow before the start of the 2016 season in Britain. For reasons of habit, superstition or cost, many cricket players at both the professional and recreational level have been slow in taking up helmets that comply with the new standard.

On Friday, on the anniversary of Hughes’s death, Australia’s cricketers wore black armbands in his honour as they began the third Test match against New Zealand in Adelaide. While cricket has made some modest improvements to player safety since Hughes’s death, it has the capacity to do more. But no matter what the sport does, eliminating all risk of a fatal accident seems impossible. “I don’t want anybody coming back to me and saying ‘I thought you said this wouldn’t happen,"’ Porter said. “We’re just trying to do the best that we can to mitigate the risks.”