Legacy of a tragedy A decade on from Phillip Hughes' death, how much has cricket changed?

The boy from Macksville, a small town pocketed between Sydney and Brisbane, formed a habit. With each century scored, he would collect the match ball, scribble the date and score by the seam.

- Taha Hashim

They filled up baskets. His father – a banana farmer who set up the bowling machine, drove him around, did whatever love asks – reckoned he had hit 68 or 70 hundreds before leaving home at the age of 17.

The runs, never-ending, turned him into an almost mythical creature, a whisper that travelled through towns and into the city. As a 12-year-old, he shared a player of the competition award with a 37-year-old.

The biography of Phillip Hughes, written affectionately by the Australian journalists Malcolm Knox and Peter Lalor, is the source of these stories and more. At 19, Hughes was the youngest to score a hundred in the final of the Sheffield Shield. At 20, came a Test cap. A few days later, the youngest to score two hundreds in a Test match, at Durban against a pace attack that does not need first-name recognition: Steyn, Morkel, Ntini and Kallis.

A few years down the line, Hughes became the first Australian to hit a century on one-day international debut. A year and a half later he became the first from the country to hit a List A double-hundred. He did it his own folksy way with a technique that could upset the prudes, high backlift to go with a cut shot for the snappers, punctuated with a flourish of the hands.