“It still hurts to this day,” Johnson said. Thinking about the short-pitched bowling of which he was such a feared exponent, he asked himself, “Was I doing the right thing? You know, was I playing in the spirit of the game?”

Immediately after Hughes’ death 12 months ago, from a blow to the head from a bouncer in a Sheffield Shield match, Johnson would not bowl short at teammates in the nets. Other bowlers were straight into it. Some batsmen did not want to face anything near their heads, whereas some specifically demanded it straight away. During the Adelaide Test match against India, the first Test match after Hughes’ funeral, Johnson did eventually bowl bouncers, and cricket recovered a semblance of normality. Yet, as Johnson has revealed in retirement, for many players that was only a semblance. The spark never quite returned. Innocence was lost – not in the hackneyed way of the post-traumatic soundbytes, but deep down, subtly, revealing itself with the passage of time.

On the surface, cricket seems little changed. Helmet manufacturers have altered their designs, but only a minority of cricketers use the added guards below the back rim of the headwear. Cricket Australia’s inquiry and the coronial inquest into Hughes’ death can be expected to bring further strengthening of protocols around protective equipment and emergency medical care in grounds. The NSW Ambulance Service’s response to Hughes’s injury will be further examined. These are solutions around the fringe, however, of what is accepted to be a freak occurrence and uncontrollable as long as the game is played with a hard ball.

The real changes, as Johnson intimated, have taken place under the skin. The outward signs are where players now rush in to attend to those who are struck either batting or fielding, and where opponents are quick to check on their welfare. This element of care is an outward sign of deeper change in cricket’s mentality.

First class cricket in Australia was halted, after Hughes’s funeral, for one week. Cricket Australia was acting under many pressures, not least the presence of an Indian touring team and the risk of a backlash from sections of the public who felt that the mourning had reached its natural conclusion. But among the 85 people Peter Lalor and I interviewed for the family-authorised biography of Hughes, there was an almost unanimous belief that cricket restarted too soon for traumatised first class and Test players. Nic Maddinson, a former roommate of Hughes and the short-leg fieldsman who was closest to him when he fell, stood down from the next round.

Hughes’ closest friends among active players – Victoria’s Aaron Finch and Matthew Wade, Queensland’s Peter Forrest, South Australia’s Tom Cooper and Travis Head, Tasmania’s Alex Doolan and Ed Cowan, and several of Hughes’ former NSW teammates who had been on the field, played on. Some bear a continuing disquiet that they were asked to do so. South Australia’s coach Darren Berry, the last to speak to Hughes off the field, was still traumatised when he left his job at the end of the summer. All say that by the end of the 2014-15 Sheffield Shield season, they were burnt-out emotionally and sick of cricket. It was the worst season of their lives and there was no hope of recovery until they could get away from the game.

Twelve months on, the pain is undiminished in Sydney grade cricket, where some of Hughes’ inner circle still play. His brother Jason and his close friend Matt Day continue with Mosman, his mate Daniel Smith is at Sydney, batting mentor Neil D’Costa is coaching at Campbelltown-Camden, and Hughes has mates scattered through Western Suburbs and other clubs. They might not be on television, but their grief is real.

Those who stayed in the public eye carried a unique burden. Johnson was not one of Hughes’ closest cricket friends, but his reaction indicates how deeply the event cut into the soul of the Australian team. Michael Clarke, who became the public face of the grieving as the leader of Australian cricket, did not score another century in any form of cricket after his 128 in that Adelaide Test match. In the prior 15 years, Clarke had made 63 centuries in all forms of representative cricket; none beyond his 63rd.

In due course, and after more time for reflection, Clarke and fellow retirees Brad Haddin, Shane Watson and Chris Rogers will be able to articulate the ongoing impact Hughes’ death had on them in 2015. During the 2014-15 Australian season, they had little chance to escape public scrutiny. It is fair to say that they paid the price for their trauma in instalments, with a final reckoning during the Ashes tour.

Nothing can be known for certain, of course, but Hughes’ death was still ramifying in the cricket sense through that tour of England. Haddin, Watson and Clarke were all on or at the SCG the day Hughes fell. Rogers was shaken badly when hit in the head while fielding in Australia last summer, and then concussed in the West Indies. The lure of winning the Ashes in England drew them forward, but hindsight says they went on too long. The emotional upset of Hughes’ death played its part, both in the burnout and its temporary masking.

The public attention that moved away from Hughes last summer, and will return this week, holds no consolation for his family, whose grief has not diminished one iota. What they see in Test cricket, through the past year, is a Phillip Hughes-shaped hole. The past season, when Australia have been so desperate for a young top-order batsman, was meant to be Hughes’ time.

A decade ago, national talent scouts identified a small group of extremely talented batsmen for the long-term future. All came from NSW, and were around the same age. Three were David Warner, Steven Smith and Usman Khawaja. But through their early careers, those three were completely outshone by Hughes. He rose to Test cricket first, and was first to be sent back to the wilderness for his rite of passage to maturation. The grand plan was that he would hit his peak in his mid to late 20s and play more than 100 Test matches for Australia. Within the cricket community, few doubted that that would happen. The most profound and lasting impacts of Hughes’ death are not in what we can see, but in what we can’t.