ICYMI: Cricket's First Responders

GH on the untold story of the death of Philip Hughes

Dear readers,

We wanted to free up a few articles from behind the paywall because we really don’t like having to be behind one. That said, as we’ve explained previously, journalism like this involves significant costs. We are not covering the games from the television.

I’m passing this one on that Gideon wrote about the match officials on the day Phillip Hughes was struck. I think it is the best thing I have read in many years. Seriously, this is a stunning piece of journalism. Gideon goes where no one else thought to go and produces a story that left me breathless.

Have a read when you get a minute.

Peter Lalor

Nobody could name them today - which, in their telling, is just fine. The best match officials, it’s said, efface themselves so completely that you’re hardly aware of their existence. By that measure they did their jobs.

But that, a decade on, has rendered theirs the untold story of perhaps Australian cricket’s most dreadful moment. When Philip Hughes sustained his mortal blow on 25 November 2014, umpires Ash Barrow and Michael Graham-Smith, with referee David Talalla, became the game’s first responders. They’ll message one another tomorrow on the tenth anniversary. Nothing weighty - just checking in. But like everyone else, they’ve been changed by the shared experience.

*

I’m chatting to Ash Barrow [above] in a cafe near my home. It’s the week before round one of the 2024-25 season, but he’s taken a break from the pitches he now tends in Casey. He’s funny, salty, a natural raconteur. He played a ton of cricket at Endeavour Hills, Doveton, Fountaingate and eventually Fitzroy-Doncaster - a keeper who stood up to the pace bowlers, a cricketer who did not stand back from a confrontation. And why would he? ‘I’ve had knives pulled on me, guns pulled on me,’ he says, then adds with a laugh: ‘I’m a Doveton boy.’

Ash remembers how his junior coach, father of the footballer Ozzie Jones, inspired him to his match-winning score in his first grand final win, by saying as he went out to bat: ‘If yer fuckin’ fail, don’t fuckin’ come back this way.’ He started umpiring in his mid-30s and stood in more than a hundred Premier matches before promotion to the first-class panel; his wife left him the day he came home with his contract. ‘You’re on your way up,’ she said. ‘And I’m on my way out.’ These days they are on good terms, and last year even went travelling together.

Barrow umpired because he liked it: it cost him money to take time off from business activities that included communications cabling, body corporate maintenance and apiary. He was also good at it, and popular: players called him ‘Wheels’, because where possible he would ride his Harley-Davidson to games. The knockabout air concealed a lot of tradecraft. When he arrived in Sydney on Wednesday 24 November 2014, for example, the first thing he did was stock the fridge of his apartment at the Meriton Suites Zetland with drinks and nibbles: after a long day, the last thing you wanted was to be doing was foraging for food in the evening. The second was to head for the Sydney Cricket ground for a routine inspection with Graham-Smith and Talalla. With his curatorial background, he sensed that the motley grass cover and bare patches on pitch number seven, nearest the Members, heralded deterioration. The conditions would need watching.

*

I’m chatting to Michael Graham-Smith [above] on Zoom. He hails from Burnie in Tasmania. He played a ton of cricket too, including twenty years of first-grade for University CC, with twelve years on the committee and seven as president. He had just slipped down to second-grade when Cricket Tasmania’s umpires coordinator Richard Widows approached him at a lunch break. ‘Ever thought about umpiring?’ said Widows. ‘I think you’d be good at it.’ Graham-Smith tried and ‘got the bug’. A teacher of arithmetic at Hobart’s Elizabeth College, he liked the maths and physics problems it served up. He was six years standing first-grade and second-grade before his first interstate gig in 2013; New South Wales v South Australia would be his first game at the SCG. When he looked up and down the New South Wales team, too, it could almost have been a Test match. The home attack he was about to umpire featured internationals Mitchell Starc, Nathan Lyon, Doug Bollinger, Shane Watson, Steve O’Keefe with the promising Sean Abbott.

The step up to the top level is steep. As a fifteen-year-old, Graham-Smith walked into the nets at Les Clark Oval in Burnie one evening, and found himself facing West Indian Winston Davis, who had taken seven for 51 against Australia in the 1983 World Cup. In the dim light, all he could see of Davis was his smile; he certainly sensed nothing of the ball before hearing its reverberating impact against the back of the net; he next heard the voice of his uncle, the former state player Trevor Docking: 'Come out of there now, Michael….’ He tells the story now with feeling: he has never needed reminding that cricket can be a dangerous game.

*

I’m having lunch with David Talalla {above], with whom I’ve been friends some years. He has a background that can only be considered unique. Born in Malaysia, resident in Australia since the age of six, he represented the former for five years, making an international hundred against Gibraltar, and appearing in the 1998 Commonwealth Games. Having followed his father into the law, he followed his own instincts into sports management, including acting as a Cricket Australia referee between 2013 and 2020.

Talalla’s CV is daunting. He has trained AFL umpires. He has mentored tennis players. He has been involved in gymnastics high performance. Today he is on the ethics and governance committee of Hockey Australia. But cricket, for which he is a Level 3 coach, is his first love. Ten years ago he was coaching at Northcote United Juniors, and thinks often about an exchange he’d had with a parent the weekend before flying to Sydney. He was squatting next to a boy called Xavier with a dozen tennis balls, flicking them up at his (helmeted) head. ‘Why are you doing that?’ Xavier’s dad Mick asked.

‘When I grew up, there were no helmets and you learned to watch the ball,’ Talalla explained. ‘Nowadays players turn their heads, even at elite level. But it’s very difficult to get hurt if you’re watching it. Take a look at You Tube one day. You never see a batter hit between the eyes.’ Not a big lesson, Talalla thought, but an important one.

*

Thinking back further, Talalla recollects the morning of 25 November as… odd. The officials went looking for a cafe for breakfast, but could find nowhere open; they tried to book a cab, but nobody would accept their fare for a ten-minute journey to the SCG. Eventually they fibbed that they were going to the airport in order to get a ride. The umpire’s room at the SCG is upstairs, out of the way, and has no vantage of the ground; the referee camps next door. A further layer of the unusual was added when Talalla learned that Australian captain Michael Clarke, who was missing the game with a long-term hamstring injury, might be holding a press conference at teatime to foreshadow his withdrawal from the forthcoming Adelaide Test.

For a Sheffield Shield match, in fact, this New South Wales v South Australia match felt disarmingly significant. The games elsewhere - Victoria v Western Australia at the MCG, Queensland v Tasmania at Allan Border Field - were attracting little attention. At the SCG there were reporters in the media centre, photographers at the perimeter. Talalla was present for the toss, which South Australia’s Johan Botha won from NSW’s Brad Haddin, electing to bat. That set the stage for Clarke’s likely replacement, Philip Hughes, returning to his old home ground for the first time since transferring his allegiance to South Australia.

As Starc prepared to bowl the match’s first ball at Hughes from the Paddington End, Michael Graham-Smith took up his stance and said: ‘Play.’ He and Barrow had earlier tossed a bail - the convention was that the taller umpire, who was Graham-Smith, went to the end indicated by the longer spigot. Graham-Smith had umpired Hughes in the previous Sheffield Shield round, Barrow had umpired him the previous season, and Talalla had refereed him during Australia A’s series against India A in Darwin in July. During those games, one of the Indian pace bowlers had loudly called umpire Paul Wilson a ‘cheat’. Hughes, who seldom had anything to say on the field, unusually came to Wilson’s defence. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘You can’t call an umpire that!’ As referee, Talalla was limited to making a complaint to the Indian management rather than laying a formal charge: it was smilingly ignored. But he made a point of thanking Hughes. ‘Good on you for saying that,’ he said. Hughes smiled. It went to the general view of the twenty-five-year-old as a solid citizen, who never needed telling right from wrong.

The surface was as bad as the umpires had anticipated: dry, lifeless, two-paced. When Bollinger finally managed to get a bouncer head high, Barrow called it ‘first for the over.’

‘Awww come on, Ash,’ Bollinger complained. ‘The pitch is shit.’

‘First for the over, Dougie,’ Barrow reiterated. Otherwise he found the game as mild as the conditions. His practice at square leg was to stand a pitch length away, so that his eyes were always operating the same range. He would only stand nearer if he sensed some spite in the game; he felt no need. The competition was willing, the temper well within bounds - he was bemused later by claims of blood-curdling sledging. The score at the first break was one for 74, with Hughes on 32. Players, umpires and referee dined, as routinely, in the carvery. But it was clear afterwards that the New South Wales leadership, captain Haddin and coach Trevor Bayliss, had used lunch to review their plans. The bowling afterwards was shorter, tighter, designed to cramp and limit. Barrow called it ‘a first-class length’, reaching the batter mainly between waist and neck. ‘Everyone knew Phil didn’t like the ball at his body,’ says Graham-Smith. ‘But he was a Test batter, an opening batter. That kind of bowling goes with it.’ Scoring slowed: Hughes made 24 in the first ten overs after the break, but only 7 in the next nine. As Abbott commenced the forty-ninth over from the Paddington End, South Australia was two for 134, with Tom Cooper 5 and Hughes 61. Hughes tugged the second ball to backward square leg for 2; the next was shorter, slanting across until it was heading over off stump.

Since then, none of Barrow, Graham-Smith or Talalla has watched again what happened next; such is the seeming clarity of their recollection, they feel no need. Barrow at square leg saw Hughes pirouette through the shot before the ball arrived, and thinks he heard the batter, just before the impact on the left hand side of his unprotected neck near the base of his skull, say: ‘Shit!’ Graham-Smith believed that the ball had hit the helmet and in the instant thought: ‘We’ll need to get someone out here to look at that.’ Then he saw Hughes stagger to the off side, bend forward as if stunned, and seem to look searchingly at the bowler.

Talalla was watching the event through his field glasses. The way Hughes’s armoured figure toppled forward reminded him of a wounded Roman gladiator crumpling in some blood-and-sandals movie. And then, as they all remember, with the clock showing 2.23pm, everything went crazy.

*

Memory exists for our benefit. Its role is to furnish needs for our survival. Each individual’s needs differ. Michael Graham-Smith recalls only fragments of the rest of the day: he suspects that this has been part of his body’s coping mechanisms. Ash Barrow is the opposite. In accidents and confrontations, he has always kept his composure. He was once filling up at a servo and saw an altercation in which a man was felled. When the police arrived, he gave them the offender’s number plate. How could he be so sure, the police wondered? Barrow had had the presence of mind to write the rego with his finger in the dust on his truck. Now he sprinted in from square leg, was among the first to reach Hughes’s prone body, and almost certainly first to apprehend the seriousness of the blow.

As players gathered round and removed Hughes’s helmet, Barrow noted blood around the batter’s nose and mouth, probably from his face-forward fall; he saw no mark or swelling on the neck where the ball had struck; he intuited somehow that death, if not already present, was coming to the cricket field. Players were signalling frantically to the dressing rooms for medical assistance. He heard their cries of: ‘Ambulance! Ambulance!’ But Barrow’s instinct was that only a miracle could now save Hughes. ‘I knew he was gone,’ he says. ‘Phil never drew breath on the ground. He exhaled a couple of times, but there was nothing going in.’

Still, he tried. Seeing medicos and support staff gathering at the boundary, Barrow called Talalla on his walkie-talkie. ‘I’m letting them on,’ he said, and began to beckon. Eventually four qualified personnel would be involved in the resuscitation efforts: team doctor Dr John Orchard and physiotherapist Murray Ryan from New South Wales, South Australian physiotherapist Jon Porter, and a specialist in emergency and intensive care, Dr Tim Stanley, who happened to be attending the game with his sons. It was Ryan asked New South Wales’s room attendant Doug Williams to arrange for a medicab; it was SCG event coordinator Scott Henderson who called an ambulance. But everything else fell to the match officials. About 2.30pm, Barrow got on his walkie-talkie to Talalla again. ‘He’s not breathing, David,’ he said. He then turned his mind to what was expedient and appropriate. He had the spider cam wires retracted in case an air ambulance needed to land; he requested that the livestream to be turned off; he asked that the photographers disperse. He recognised Hughes’s mother Virginia and sister Megan, and Abbott’s mother, in the Ladies Stand. The last thing they needed was for this to become a voyeur’s frenzy.

Talalla rang his immediate boss, match officials manager Sean Easey, at Cricket Australia. Easey said that, yes, he’d been watching the game in his office at Jolimont; he had seen Hughes go down. ‘Well, it’s six minutes, Sean,’ said Talalla urgently. ‘And he’s not breathing.’ He heard the tone in Easey’s voice change. ‘Someone higher up than me will call you,’ he replied before ringing off, and when Talalla’s phone rang again it was Sean Cary, CA’s head of operations. Talalla asked what should he do about the game. ’It’s your call, David,’ said Carey. ‘Whatever decision you make we will back you.’

So Talalla headed down to the field himself. People were wandering in aimless circles. Abbott was being escorted from the field. Doug Bollinger was bawling. ‘Dougie,’ said Talalla, ‘you need to get back to the rooms.’ Curator Tom Parker was likewise in tears. ‘Is it the pitch?’ he kept asking. ‘Is it the pitch?’ Worst affected seemed to be South Australian coach Darren Berry, who had been watching from the upper deck of the Members, and for whom this triggered dreadful decade-old memories. ‘This is just like when Hookesy died,’ he was repeating, in a lost voice; he, Jon Porter and assistant coach Rob Cassell had all been out with Hookes the night that Victoria’s coach had suffered his fatal blow in January 2004.

Graham-Smith approached. ‘Bayliss has lost the plot,’ he said. ‘He keeps telling us we have to call the game off. I keep telling him we don’t have the power.’ Talalla approached the New South Wales coach. ‘Trevor, I’m the referee,’ he said. ‘I’m the only person with the power to abandon this match. I’m happy to call today’s play off now. But once Phil leaves, we’ll get the captains and coaches together to discuss what we do next, OK?’ Bayliss nodded. Talalla was less sure of what followed. As he turned towards the Ladies Stand, he saw Virginia and Megan Hughes, Phil’s mother and sister. His mind at once began racing: ‘Do I invite them on? What if they want to be with Phil? Do I say no? What if I say yes?’ He decided to let the medical personnel do their work, which, like Barrow, he had an uneasy sense was hopeless. ‘Phil’s eyes were dark and rolled back in his head,’ Talalla says. ‘They were only keeping him alive artificially.’

When Hughes was loaded into the road rather than the air ambulance, which arrived almost simultaneously, Barrow assumed the worst also. But when Talalla spoke a few months later to an uncle who had worked in Formula One, he sensed a rationale for the effort. ‘You know,’ Talalla ventured tentatively, ‘I think Phil was dead already when he left the SCG.’ Talalla’s uncle nodded. ’In Formula One, no driver dies at the track,’ he said. ’It’s bad for business. They keep them alive long enough that they can say they “died in hospital”.’

*

What do you do, under these circumstances? With the players back in their changing rooms, Tallala sent room attendants to fetch Botha, Berry, Haddin and Bayliss. They convened around a long table in the umpire’s room with Barrow and Graham-Smith; Talalla could see the shock in their faces. He opened the floor. ‘David, we can’t play,’ began Haddin. ‘We can’t face bowling at 140kmh in this frame of mind…’ His voice trailed off. The referee looked around. Nobody elaborated but no-one dissented. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Decision made. Match abandoned.’ The meeting had taken two minutes, and Talalla advised Cary of the consensus. The next meeting, however, was more awkward.

Somehow, the police had been summoned: an older male and a younger woman. The latter accosted Barrow demanding the ball, bat and helmet as ‘evidence.’ Barrow was resisting. ‘They’re not for you to take,’ he insisted. When Talalla intervened, the officer further demanded that Abbott be produced for interview. ‘You’re not going anywhere near him,’ said Talalla. When she remonstrated, Tallala turned to her male colleague. ‘This isn’t a murder scene,’ he said. ‘It’s a game of first-class cricket. There’s footage if you want to watch it. But there’s no way you’re getting anywhere near Abbott. Who’s in charge of the ground? You as inspector or me as match referee?’ Talalla wasn’t actually quite sure of the legalities, and was relieved when law backed off. ‘You’re in charge,’ the policeman agreed. The police settled for taking the equipment; the players and coaches were able to leave more or less straight away.

The officials stayed. There was paperwork to conclude, arrangements to be be made. Their phones were blowing up, but they answered few calls. The International Cricket Council checked in. So did CA’s cricket services manager Cate Ryan, who asked them what they preferred to do about travelling home. All decided to leave the following morning. Talalla heard that Berry was in a bad state, had barricaded himself in a toilet was refusing to leave. He started calling him, over and over again; there was no answer. At last, he was told, the deadlock had been broken, and South Australia’s coach had emerged.

Otherwise, the trio remained in the umpires’ room, saying little. Stillness descended over the emptying ground. Beers materialised. Looks were exchanged. At last, around 5pm, Barrow piped up. ‘I can’t stand this,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk. I need some fresh air.’ So the officials descended to ground level, and started performing quiet laps. They were interrupted only by a security guard, who asserted that alcohol was not permitted on the arena.

‘Oh come on,’ said Barrow. ‘Have some compassion.’ The guard wasn’t having it. ‘No beers on the ground,’ he repeated. So the umpires set their beers aside and continued walking. ‘I don’t know how many laps we did,’ says Talalla. ‘We just seemed to keep walking.’ The sun had fallen behind the stands by the time they packed up. As they sat in their cab bound for Zetland, Talalla mused aloud. ‘It’s 6.27pm!’ he said. ‘Where’s the time gone?’ Four hours seemed to have passed in a blink.

‘We need a drink,’ said Barrow. Evening found the officials at the Bat and Ball Hotel on Cleveland Street. The news about Hughes was featuring on the pub’s television screens, but the officials went unrecognised. Barrow and Graham-Smith drained their pints mechanically; Talalla, teetotal for three years, was tempted but stuck to water. Nobody discussed Hughes directly. As Graham-Smith remained mostly silent, Barrow and Talalla went over their response to the incident - the incident itself felt too large to process as yet. It helped, they think. Later they adjourned to Barrow’s room, where his fridge was stocked. But nobody could sleep. When Talalla turned in just after midnight, he lay awake staring at the ceiling, going obsessively over the question of whether he had done the right thing by Virginia and Megan Hughes. Should he have called them over to see Philip? ‘I didn’t know,’ he says. ‘I still don’t.’

At Kingsford Smith Airport next morning, the trio bumped into the South Australians. Berry thanked Talalla for his phone calls. It was all, you know, so hard. ‘It felt weird flying back from a match that hadn’t been completed,’ recalls Graham-Smith. 'You don’t expect to go to your workplace and have someone die.’

*

The ten days after Hughes was pronounced dead on 27 November, when cricket was suspended all over Australia and the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was delayed, were unearthly. Nobody could think of anything else. Everything seemed heightened. Barrow was anxious to umpire again as soon as he could. ‘I need to get back on the horse,’ he explained to CA. ‘You need to give me another game. I need to start, count to six, and call over.’ Graham-Smith was content, for the time being, to put out his bats. Talalla remembers a text from Xavier’s father Mick, after their exchange about the practice session. ‘You must have had a premonition,’ said Mick.

It felt almost unreal when the trio reunited Melbourne on 2 December to connect with flights to Coffs Harbor, in order to attend the Hughes funeral in Macksville. Suddenly they were standing, in feint awe, amid many of the greatest names in global cricket: Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Dean Jones, Brian Lara, Adam Gilchrist. Graham-Smith remembers how Gilchrist recognised and sought them out. ‘I know today’s going to be tough for you guys,’ he said. I hope it goes OK for you.’

As they stood among the thousand faces in the hall of Macksville High School, the baking heat intensified the emotions. Coats were shed, ties loosened. Talalla noted how the Indian contingent did not join in: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma, Ravi Shastri and assistant manager Arshad Ayub maintained sartorial standards. ‘I’m impressed you kept your jackets and ties on,’ he said to Kohli. ‘It was a mark of respect,’ said Kohli. ‘We respected Phil.’ Gilchrist, Jones and Warne then went to a bottle shop to provide slabs for the bus journey back to the airport. How strange, the officials think, that, a decade on, only Gilchrist of that trio survives.

Normality would be harder to retrieve than by a funeral, however solemn. A week later, even as the Border-Gavaskar Trophy got unsteadily underway at Adelaide Oval, Barrow umpired and Talalla refereed South Australia again at Blundstone Arena. Botha’s men folded for 45 in the second innings. It was hard to escape the feeling that they were still playing their previous match. At lunch one day, Tom Cooper, who had been the non-striker at the SCG when Hughes was hit, approached Talalla; they arranged to meet afterwards. ‘How are you coping?’ Talalla asked.

‘I’m not going well, David,’ said Cooper. ‘I can’t get it out of my head. That last groan. I can’t stop thinking about it.’ Cooper looked close to years. ‘You know he [Hughes] was staying with me?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Talalla. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Yeah, he was sleeping on my couch,’ Cooper replied. ‘The day after I got back, the mattress he’d ordered turned up. My partner started crying. I started crying.’

‘Who’s packing up his kit?’ asked Talalla.

‘I am,’ Cooper answered. ‘I’m hoping it will give me closure.’

Closure: you couldn’t just hope for it. Talalla sought Berry out after the game. ‘I talked to Tom,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get that guy to see someone.’ But what about himself?

*

CA offered all the match officials counselling services. All accepted. Barrow was best able to rationalise events. ‘I knew Phil Hughes,’ he told the counsellor. ‘I didn’t know Phil Hughes.’ Said the counsellor: ‘I wish some of the players could take that on board.’

When Graham-Smith tried that, however, it didn’t quite work. He next umpired the Sheffield Shield in February 2015; when he next umpired at the SCG in November, the game again was left incomplete, being abandoned after 34.2 overs because of the sorry state of the outfield. ‘It was starting to seem like I was destined never to get through a game there,’ he recalls, and confesses he struggled to admit the impact of Hughes’s death. ‘Part of me felt that it wasn’t my place to be burdened by it,’ he recalls. ‘Because that’s not the match officials’ role; we’re simply to make sure that the game is facilitated. So it was a heavy presence on me, and I was reluctant to acknowledge it. I had to process it in my own way, and that took probably four to five years.’

Graham-Smith remembers the instant it felt like the past began receding. Four years after Hughes’s death, he was again umpiring NSW and South Australia at the SCG. He was again standing at the Paddington End. Sean Abbott was again bowling the forty-ninth over of the match. Tom Cooper was again non-striker. A left-hander, Jake Lehmann, was facing. He looked around. Did anyone else realise the significance of the third ball of the over? Nobody seemed to - Lehmann smashed it through cover for four. ‘That was the moment I think I started moving on,’ Graham-Smith says.

David Talalla had the most complex reaction. ‘I come from an emotional family,’ he explains. ‘We see life as precious.’ His father Richard, as a judge of Malaysia’s High Court, was forced to enact that country’s punitive drug trafficking laws. When he was stricken with bowel cancer in his 60s, he worried about the influence of the souls he had condemned to death, and asked to be excused further such cases. Talalla brooded on Hughes’s death, especially on his dealing, or not dealing, with the Hughes family. Had he failed? Had he got it wrong? At length, his wife said: ‘You need help. You’re traumatised.’ Though he was reluctant to visit a psychiatrist, CA’s Cate Ryan arranged for him to meet a counsellor, a former homicide detective Alicia Corbett, at Jolimont. ‘That was OK,’ he says. ‘It was my home ground.’ Still, what was wrong with him?

I said to Alicia: ‘Why am I so affected by this? Phil wasn’t a friend. Much as I admired him, I wasn’t going to invite him to my kid’s christening party.'

She said: ‘David, in my previous life I was a police officer. I worked with the homicide squad. I saw many terrible things. But I always had time to get ready for murder scene, to see something awful. You didn’t. Nobody expected someone to die at a cricket match.’

Talalla was scheduled to referee a Big Bash League at the SCG just after Christmas. He admitted to Corbett he was reluctant to go. She, kindly, admonished him: ‘You’re lucky. You get a chance to say goodbye. Not everyone gets that opportunity.’ So well before the gates opened at SCG for the Sixers v Scorchers game on 29 December 2014, Talalla walked to the middle, stood just off pitch seven, and said under his breath: ‘Thanks for the memories Philip. You were an exceptional player. It was a privilege to watch you. I hope wherever you are you’re OK.’ It seemed to help. Next May, he went to the SCG to watch his team Carlton take on the Swans. ‘I could see the footy players running over where Phil died,’ he recalls. ‘But I thought: “No, I’m good here”.’

*

There is good and good, of course. The year Hughes died was also published Bessel van der Kolk’s controversial The Body Keeps the Score, exploring the neuroscience of trauma, and the way the body carries its somatic signature. Barrow, Graham-Smith and Talalla are encouraging advertisements for the survivability of the most harrowing experiences. But that does not mean they are unmarked, or, indeed, that they were not, at times, let down.

A case in point was the inquest into Hughes’s death held over four days in October 2016 at the NSW Coroners’ Court in Glebe. Both umpires were called as witnesses, and found themselves awaiting their turn among players in various degrees of emotional distress: Graham-Smith recalls entering the hearing room as Tom Cooper left, slumping in tears after testifying. Barrow and Graham-Smith had been promised assistance by CA. None appeared. Barrow had asked if he could be excused from umpiring a Matador Cup match the following day. CA insisted he do the game, which happened to involve NSW and South Australia. On the match morning at Drummoyne Oval, Barrow joined Cooper, Abbott and Bollinger in a group hug. But CA’s refusal of the only request he had made felt churlish.

A month later, Talalla refereed and Graham-Smith umpired a Sheffield Shield match at the WACA between WA and Tasmania where Adam Voges and Alex Doolan suffered head blows and were ruled out of further involvement in the match. ‘I remember Adam limping off,’ says Talalla. ‘He was like a heavyweight boxer out on his feet. His mother was there and met him at the fence.’ Barrow saw this too - he was watching the livestream - and was furious about it. He rang CA to ask why the cameras had not been turned off as he had insisted on the day of Hughes’s death. ‘Haven’t we learned anything?’ he asked. He senses that his card was marked accordingly, that CA preferred umpires to be automata, distant from the players, punctilious about their paperwork. His contract was not renewed the following year, on grounds of age.

The three feel content now, reconciled. They were serious in our conversations, not earnest. They make no big deal about their experiences. They have no plan to reunite on the anniversary, though they will be in touch. From time to time, says Graham-Smith, the subject of Hughes will come up in conversation with others, and he will identify himself as an eyewitness. ‘People will go: “You mean, you were the umpire in that game?”,’ he says. ‘Most people have no idea.’

To be sure, the experience lurks. It is, in some respects, embodied. To this day, Talalla encourages young players to look at YouTube footage of how batters get into trouble taking their eye off the ball. Except that not so long ago he was perusing footage himself, and glimpsed a replay of Hughes being struck - he slammed the laptop shut, turned it off and walked away. And Ash Barrow, at the end of a long, wide-ranging conversation full of good cricket stories from here and there, surprised me by rolling up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo of Hughes’s vital statistics.

That’s 707 (Hughes's NSW playing number), 612 (Hughes’s SA playing number), 408 (his Test number), and, of course, 63 not out. ‘My way of saying goodbye,’ he said simply.