Australia's Phil Hughes celebrates reaching his century during an ODI against Sri Lanka at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on January 11, 2013. — Reuters

For such a young man, Phillip Hughes saw clearly the road he wanted to travel.

In cricket terms, it began with the Pacific Highway that runs right through his home town of Macksville and crosses the adjacent Nambucca River marking the mid-point of the journey between Sydney and Brisbane.

As a hugely talented and even more highly driven 17-year-old, Hughes saw that road stretching from his family’s banana property to the opportunities afforded by the city.

And despite his innate shyness and a country boy’s love of the bucolic life he gave up his other boyhood love – rugby league – and took his cricket kit to Sydney.

He was chasing a dream born around the time he first turned out for the Macksville RSL Cricket Club’s A-grade team against some combative and vastly more seasoned country cricketers – at the impressionable age of 12.

From the moment he moved into a small apartment close to his batting coach’s academy – the same address that had previously hosted another of shared mentor Neil D’Costa’s pupils, Michael Clarke – nobody who knew Phillip Hughes doubted that road would take him further.

To the Sydney Cricket Ground, where he played his first match for New South Wales 10 days before his 19th birthday, making him the youngest to don the baggy blue cap since Clarke eight years earlier, another link in the chain of friendship that bound the pair.