I’m writing this in the minutes after his passing. The cricket community is numb with grief. To those at the epicentre, to Sean Abbott and those closest to Phil Hughes whose sorrow is profound and inexpressible, we send heartfelt sympathy. Sean, we can’t imagine the full magnitude of your feelings. It wasn’t your fault. That’s a blunt thing to say, and hopefully you realise it anyway, but we want you to know we fully understand it just wasn’t your fault.

To our readers: by the time you get this, everything, from the tragedy’s full import to the matter of safety, will have been covered. Grief will still be playing itself out, publicly and privately. So, while I’m freshly inhaling the foul air of this rotten, unjust offering of fate, I want to share something else.

I have a magazine to get out tomorrow (the one you’re holding). I’ve already been forced to make, in the two hours now passed, hasty workaday decisions. In a job that right now seems meaningless, even burdensome, these decisions involve what should properly be included and excluded at a time like this.

For instance, I began removing references to certain deeds that made those men in this issue’s gallery formidable and fearsome to a batsman. I soon realised almost any word or phrase describing the best fast bowlers might offend someone. Once I saw I wouldn’t have much content left, I asked myself, “am I just pandering?” After all, at times like this, when people are terribly stricken, an abiding minority dine out on indignation.

What of Phil? He never needed people huffing on his behalf. He wouldn’t want one jot or tittle changed for his sake, just as he wouldn’t want one word of cricket’s laws altered.

Phil had a conspicuous, childlike pride in being a cricketer. Not just in his achievements – his hunger to become established in the Australian side remained unsatisfied. His pride at simply playing the game he loved for a living was so candid, it was as though he couldn’t believe his luck. The pictures of him as a kid, cherished bat in hand, reveal a smaller version of the same happy boy he was when he passed.

Facing a fast bowler is unquestionably one of sport’s most dangerous tasks, but Phil loved the challenge of a fired-up fastie hurling a hard, shiny cherry. This affable, understated and observant young man poured all his flamboyance, joy and competitiveness into the way he played the sport he adored. If he could speak on the matter, he’d look at any of the merchants of terror in our gallery and say, “Bring him on.”

Batsmen and bowlers are natural enemies; direct opponents. But only one has the potential to physically harm the other. It’s the way it is. It’s a contest Hughes savoured. Watch his twin Test hundreds in 2009, when he defied and defeated Morkel, Steyn and Ntini, and try to conclude otherwise. Steyn, by the way, is one of those immortals of menace in our gallery. At just 20, Phil had the opportunity to say, “Bring him on”, and won, emphatically.

We know what else Phil, a considerate man, would have thought had we removed this issue’s gallery: we’d be insulting Sean Abbott by implication. Fast bowling is the trade Sean laboured at, grew up loving, as Hughes did his. Mind you, Phil might have ragged him even while consoling him: “Not your fault mate. Rubbish ball. Should’ve given it what it deserved.”

There’s mention of Sean in the BBL preview. Do I delete it, because magazine wisdom says timeliness is important, and I don’t know where he’ll be by the time this issue comes out? He might choose not to play, now or ever again. Well, he’s already being counselled that a life changed forever needs to proceed as normally as possible. As I write, he’s a current Australian cricketer. To expunge mention of him – that’s tasteless. It might seem editorially absurd a couple of weeks hence, but let it.

Just before Hughes was felled, chairman of selectors, Rod Marsh, indicated in a press conference that he was “very close” to selection; a “very impressive young cricketer”. Now 18 hours have passed since he went, and we learn that, sure enough, fate granted him his wish at the moment everything else was taken from him and he was taken from us. After a halting start, a significant Test career was about to begin in earnest. Damn it. Damn fate. I find myself wishing Sean Abbott would defy it by going on to greatness.

Dispassionate observers will wonder, archly, at the fuss. After all, ordinary people die all the time, and our grief will soon seem excessive, they’ll say. Don’t bother explaining. The cricket community is devastated, the sports world shaken. Most others are profoundly troubled without quite knowing why.

Why? Because beginning with the incisions those first harrowing images made and ending with Phil’s catastrophic parting, we experienced an amputation. Raw nerves of feeling and memory stream back to a vanished limb; gone, yet going nowhere.

Published in Inside Cricket, December 2014