Not even its most ardent apostles can claim that cricket is a sport with a global reach. In pre-internet Europe, to travel beyond Calais was to lose touch with the cricket scores entirely. Yet the shocking death of Phillip Hughes has taken cricket into the headlines in some unexpected places.
The young Australian batsman’s death in Sydney rated coverage and pictures in normally cricket-free media such as France’s Le Monde, Turkey’s Hürriyet and Argentina’s La Nación. Italy’s Corriere della Sera even followed up the local angle, recalling that Hughes’s Sicilian-born mother, Virginia, made sure her son had dual Australian-Italian nationality, and reporting that Hughes himself had spoken of perhaps playing for Italy at the end of his career.
Hughes’s funeral today is both a very local and a strikingly national affair – yet the world will be watching too. The entire population of his home town, Macksville in New South Wales, has been invited to say farewell to its favourite son. Four of Australia’s five free-to-air television channels have scrapped their schedules for the event, all emphasising the national dimension, while dozens of current and former Australian players and officials, headed by Australian captain Michael Clarke, will be there to pay their last respects. But the tributes and gestures of solidarity here and elsewhere are a reminder that Phillip Hughes’s very personal tragedy has reached far beyond cricket’s normal boundary to places in which the name Tendulkar means nothing and where Wisden is unknown.
