Risk, danger and cricket: the death of Phillip Hughes

Greg Melick SC, representing the Hughes family, countered that the short-pitched bowling deployed on the field that day "increased the risk of injury to Phillip" in being sustained and unruly. Adding to that sin was a belief that sledging had, in fact, occurred, a fact which "must cast serious doubts over other evidence."

The problem in such cases of crisis is that eliminating every fundamental risk eliminates the flavour, and essence, of challenging sport. Nine balls in a row, or eight, or less, might well be disproportionate, and riles the guardians of good code conducts. But as to whether any such impediment might have prevented the death is impossible, and even futile, to say.

Instead, the regime of grief becomes the regime of control, imposing impediments on combative behaviour, trimming the gladiators by placing flowers on their weapons. Even worse, the weapons are removed altogether. The element of chance can never be eliminated.

Regulators off the pitch, and the participants on it, perennially feature traditional battles of control and resistance. Rarely do regulators strike the balance on risk and challenge. But the issue of Hughes' death, while truly tragic, cannot dispense with the sense that he played, as all at the highest level do, with risk. No regulation, or state of equipment, could have dispensed with it in its entirety.

Those who were accused of enhancing that risk played the predictable foil. Deeming them guilty in any sense would necessitate not so much a curbed form of cricket as an essentially defanged one. They, at the very least, should also be entitled to grieve with regret.