Here’s hoping

I like cricket. Today is a bad day.

Phillip Hughes isn't my daughter, Grace. And he isn't that other, vastly more famous, but much deader W. G. Grace. That's the problem, we assign. Being dead a hundred years, that's ok. That's because you were born more than a hundred years ago. Not because you were hit in the head.

When I was nineteen a not particularly competent fast-bowling friend of mine, whose name was Shane, bowled a ball that brushed the side of my face. I was trying to hook, I missed, and he, fortunately, missed also. The ball grazed my face, but not my mien. How does one advance the calculus of an event that did not happen? It could have broken my jaw, or broken my will. It could have removed from me my facility to understand the nature of danger. It could have killed me.

It wasn't likely to kill me. I know that because many bouncers are bowled, and few are felled. Batsmen die of old age, and alcoholic arrogance, surrounded by WAG wives and handsome, coordinated kids. I was not such a batsman, but then Shane, despite his estimable name, was not much of a bowler.

But, if it had killed me, I wouldn't have the written word to console me, and I wouldn't have had a child, and then another child, and I wouldn't have had to deal with the other child being struck by a rock, shaped like a ball, and delivered with the same lack of intentionality, but with near equivalent consequence, to that daughter's head.

She recovered, arguably the recovery lacking interest because it was vastly more likely than the initial injury. What happened to her, happened despite the fact that it can't. She was floored by a billion-to-one event, its mischance fuelled only by the enormous number of events that provided kindling.

Phil Hughes got hit in the head. I'm barely a fan of cricket these days, and I'm not a fan of his. I am a fan of heads, and of course, I hope (and forlornly hope that hoping helps, while fully aware that hoping is hapless) that his head remains the one that made the many bad off-side decisions that just barely, and perhaps even unjustifiably, kept him out of the Test team.

If this turns out badly, worse than it already obviously is, there will be some seeking to learn a lesson. But there is no lesson, one can be the first to suffer, without being the worst to suffer, because the shit that happens, happens because events don't reveal their cause in the singularity of their happening, but in the vast inexplicable but plausible web of chance and mischance. Phillip, I'm sorry that this happened, but I seek solace in the wonder that you had the opportunity to cut so many balls to the boundary, because your ancestors didn't suffer more severe consequences for their actions than you. Here's to the inconceivable unlikelihood that you did the stuff that has now caused you to suffer so much, and to the satisfying reality that I had the opportunity to bear testimony to those events, and might have the opportunity to witness them again.