'On a heater': The path walked – and untouched – by Phillip Hughes

It's one of those statistical quirks that, at the time of his death, Phillip Hughes had scored precisely the same number of Test runs – 1,535 – as another prodigiously talented NSW-born batter on the rise, Steven Smith.

Hughes and Smith were both 25, though the former was just three days away from turning 26, and around six months older.

Both had been maligned for the unorthodoxy of their techniques. Both had been touted for greatness. Both had ridden troughs and scaled highs. Both had been picked and dropped multiple times, and tried in numerous positions in the order (Smith in six, Hughes in four).

Yet in the 16 months that preceded Hughes' death, the pair's fortunes in Baggy Green took dramatically different turns.

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Lord's, July 2013. Australia have slumped to a 347-run humiliation in the second Ashes Test. It's a sixth straight defeat – the first time that's happened since 1984 – and new coach Darren Lehmann, whose tenure is just two matches old, knows change is an inevitable consequence.

A number of batters are in the firing line. Smith's returns of 2 and 1 at Lord's push his Test average down to 29.00 after nine matches. The jack-in-the-box Blues batter – whose first iteration as a Test player began three years prior as a leg-spinning allrounder – was recalled to the side for the India tour that preceded these Ashes. Batting at No.5 for the first time, he made 92 in Mohali in his first start in more than two years. Lehmann reportedly prefers the idea of right-handers against England's ace off-spinner Graeme Swann – particularly ones who are willing to hit straight and hard. Smith fits that description, and so too does Tasmanian George Bailey, who has to date made his name as a limited-overs player but is moving into the Test frame.

All of which leaves Hughes in a predicament. After returns of 1 and 1 at Lord's, his recent history stands at eight single-figure scores from his past 12 Test innings, though all have come on challenging tours of India and England. His career average is 32.65 after 49 innings, with three hundreds and seven fifties.   

Dotted among Hughes' recent failures are some innings of substance. Close observers are still noticing progress. Having been all at sea against spin through the first two Tests in India, he top scored for Australia in the second innings of the third with 69, his 147-ball knock only ended by a poor lbw call. In the final Test, he made a confident 45 from 59 balls before playing on to Ishant Sharma.  

"You never really know how you play spin until you tour India, when the ball's turning square," says Ed Cowan, who was in the Test side alongside Hughes at the time. "He had to kind of unpick his technique and work out a way that he was going to grow as an international cricketer.

"I think on that tour, he'd worked hard and found a bit of a groove in those final two Tests … and he'd felt that those little problems that had existed in his game had started to be worked out."

Back in the UK, and Lehmann has already dispensed with Cowan, who is dropped after the first Ashes Test for another top-order left-hander, Usman Khawaja. Ahead of the third Test at Old Trafford, the new head coach wants to find a way to recall David Warner, who has returned from Africa (after being banished following his Joe Root altercation) with 193 against South Africa A to his name.

"He played well (in Pretoria) and did exactly what we wanted him to do," Lehmann says. "We want blokes to make hundreds, and he's ticked that box."

In between the second and third Test, Smith makes a hundred against Sussex. Hughes, who stands tall with an unbeaten 81 from No.6 in the first Test as part of an epic final-wicket stand with Ashton Agar, is Australia's leading first-class run-scorer for the tour (436 runs at 72), but he is yet to hit a century. He and Cowan both make fifties in a big opening stand in Hove, but Lehmann wants more.

"I would have liked them to make hundreds," he says. "When you get in that scenario you should be making big hundreds."

Timing, it seems, is everything. Warner's hundred in Pretoria is his seventh in first-class cricket. Smith's in Hove is his sixth. Hughes has 21. He is axed for the Manchester Test as Warner returns at No.6.

"I probably scored one of my better Test innings (in the first Test) so it's something I'm not overly concerned about," Hughes tells reporters. "I feel my game is in a really good place. Also I got runs (against) Sussex, as well."

Australia draw the third Test, largely off the back of Michael Clarke's first-innings 187. The visitors go on to lose the series 3-0 but Smith breaks through with a maiden hundred at The Oval in the final Test.

Hughes is in contention for a return to the side at The Oval but is ultimately overlooked for what would have been a fifth call-up in Baggy Green; sidelined and disillusioned, he seems the poster boy for a system that has become, according to journalist Robert Craddock at the time, "too neurotic for its own good".

"England are doing to Australia what we used to do to them," Craddock adds. "Making selectors trigger happy and players twitchy."

When he is axed after Lord's, Hughes has played 26 Tests. He is still more than four months from turning 25. Only one man in history – Steve Waugh – has played more than Hughes' 49 Test innings for Australia at the exact same age.

Waugh, famously, took 27 Tests to score a maiden hundred. Going into that breakthrough match, he was averaging 30.52; in 142 Tests from that point on, he scored 9,828 runs at 55.21.

Hughes, tragically, will never play a 27th Test.

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Phillip Hughes heads home from the UK and in the 2013-14 summer piles on 597 runs in six Sheffield Shield matches for South Australia. He does as he's asked by Lehmann, adding three more hundreds to his incredible record (for context, his final count of 26 first-class hundreds is seven more than the retired Matthew Wade's career tally, and four more than 30-year-old Travis Head's current tally).

Yet Hughes cannot get a look-in to a Test side that has turned its fortunes around spectacularly. Australia debut Bailey in Brisbane, then field an unchanged XI through a home Ashes whitewash. In the months that follow, a recall for Shaun Marsh and a Baggy Green for Alex Doolan during a winning Test series in South Africa evidently leave Hughes well down the pecking order.

He is a late addition to that squad – called up as cover for an injured Marsh, who ends up playing anyway – though in the country of his greatest triumph five years earlier, he is deemed surplus to requirements. Instead, he watches as Marsh (148) and Doolan (89) both shine in the series opener, and Warner matches Hughes' feat from 2009, scoring a century in each innings of the decisive third Test.

By the time Australia return from South Africa, Smith and Warner are key cogs in a side that has now played 11 Tests without Hughes, and won seven of its past eight.

Through the middle of 2014, while the two new Test stars take seven months off from first-class cricket, Hughes continues his hot run of form with Australia A. The 25-year-old is named captain for a tri-series against India A and South Africa A in Queensland and the Northern Territory, which takes in both one-day and first-class matches.

On July 16, he hits 100 not out in a four-day game against India A in Brisbane. On July 29, he hits an unbeaten 202 against South Africa in Darwin, becoming the first Australian man to score a double hundred in a limited-overs match. Then on August 17 and 18, he switches gears, facing 440 balls and batting almost 10 hours against the South Africans for a career-high 243 not out.

The big runs against both red ball and white showcase an aspect of Hughes' batting that has been lost with time: his versatility. A decade on, he remains the only Australian – and one of fewer than 10 worldwide – to average 40-plus in first-class, List A and T20 cricket (min. 1,000 runs in each).

It also makes it three double centuries in nine months – a period in which Hughes has hammered 973 runs at 74.85 in 15 first-class innings. As Warner and Smith are coming of age on the Test scene, Hughes' batting appears to be moving to a new level in the relative backwaters of first-class cricket.

The Townsville epic though, is the final hundred he scores.

"I think he was ready to thrive," says Khawaja. "I think just before he passed away, Phillip Hughes was on an absolute heater."

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So how might have Phillip Hughes' next iteration as a Test cricketer played out? It's a hypothetical that moves us from the world of stats and solid evidence to pure speculation, though on cricket.com.au's documentary, The Boy from Macksville, several of his former teammates are quick to state their belief that he was set to be a 100-Test player.

Two narratives exist as to the specific route back into the Test team Hughes was set to take in that 2014-15 summer. The more popular one is that, ahead of the first Test against India in Brisbane, he was being recalled in place of the injured Clarke (this has been confirmed by Clarke). Just last month though, Lehmann said Hughes was in fact coming back into the team as an opener, with 37-year-old Chris Rogers set to make way.

At Shield level, Hughes had only ever been an opener. It is the spot he seemed destined to fill alongside Warner, either that summer or after the 2015 Ashes, when Rogers – who went on to average 56 in his final nine Tests – retired anyway.

Yet in whichever position he was recalled against India, the left-hander had a prime opportunity to state his case. In form and about to enter the back half of his 20s, Hughes looked well placed to capitalise on what became a run-heavy series; in four matches, 15 centuries were scored. A maiden home Test hundred for the left-hander would likely have seen his stocks soar ahead of a two-Test tour of the Caribbean that preceded the 2015 Ashes.

"His game was only getting better," says Clarke. "He was learning more about it. He understood his strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly, he was OK with his strengths and weaknesses; he knew his technique wasn't perfect, but he knew how to make it work."

Hughes' first Test captain, Ricky Ponting, insists he had the youngster earmarked for a long career in Baggy Green from the time they began playing together, singling out his propensity for hard work and his passion for the game as driving forces that would have allowed him to prevail over his technical deficiencies.

With Rogers, Clarke and Shane Watson all playing their final Tests in that 2015 Ashes, positions became available in the Australian batting order. Across the next three-and-a-half years, outside of a brief late-career flourish from Adam Voges, only Hughes' former Blues teammates – Smith, Warner and Khawaja – averaged 40-plus (min 1,000 runs) as the Aussies suffered Test series defeats away to Sri Lanka, South Africa, India and Pakistan (in the UAE), and at home to South Africa and India.

"I thought he was going to be a long-term Test player from the start," Ponting says. "I always felt that he was going to be good enough to overcome the technique stuff because of how many runs he scored, his love for the game, his love for batting.

"I mean, everyone talks about Smith being someone that hit a lot of balls, and Justin Langer hit a lot of balls, and Steve Waugh hit a lot of balls. No one hit as many as 'Hughesy'. He loved it. He loved batting. He loved the preparation side of it. He loved trying to find ways to get better.

"And when you've got that real hunger and desire to want to be the best … I felt he could have been a really long-term Test opener or number three, and the same in the one-day game."

The Boy from Macksville premieres tonight (Dec 6) after coverage of the second Test in Adelaide on cricket.com.au's digital platforms, as well as Channel 7, 7plus, Fox Sports and Kayo Sports.