Cricket??s worst week has provided scope for much soul-searching but, in terms of seeking ways of making the sport safer, the death of Oscar Hillel perhaps requires more of a reaction than that of Phil Hughes.

Cricket??s worst week has provided scope for much soul-searching but, in terms of seeking ways of making the sport safer, the death of Oscar Hillel perhaps requires more of a reaction than that of Phil Hughes.

That is not in any way to under-state the devastating nature of what happened to the young Australian last week.

On a personal level it was an incident that hit home hard. My own older son, a decent cricketer at Stirling County, is the same age as Hughes was when he was killed last week.

We played together in his first senior match as a 13-year-old for the Doune Village team and in his first first and second XI matches for Stirling.

Even when we batted together, I always felt nervous, but only because I wanted him to do well, not because I was worrying about there being an imminent risk to his well-being.

Given that, even at our level, the sport regularly involves bowlers delivering an extremely dangerous missile at upwards of 70 mph ?? 90 mph-plus at the top level ?? that might almost seem callous.

Arguably worse still, the briefest statistical analysis would demonstrate that my teenage daughter is at far greater risk in pursuing her love of equestrian sport.

However, in all things there must be risk assessment, weighing up the benefits of any activity with whatever danger exists.

Phil Hughes died playing a sport he loved. All evidence suggests that this exceedingly fit young man was freakishly unlucky in suffering an injury that was as unlikely as it was, in statistical terms, ultimately inevitable given the number of fast deliveries that are hurled into a batsman??s air-space every day around the world.

In terms of the acceptability of the risk, it has been pointed out that he was not wearing the very latest model of helmet which might have offered slightly better protection. However, there were no helmets at all until 35 years ago and bowlers are neither faster, nor more hostile towards specialist batsmen such as Hughes, than they were in the 1970s, or indeed the 1930s when ??bodyline?? was generating controversy.

Taken in context, this freak accident was never going to bring about significant change for the sport, but the death of Hillel is perhaps another matter.

In this year during which the centenary of the First World War has been marked, the echo of tales of those killed with the last bullet of the war adds poignancy since he was, apparently, officiating in the final match of the Israeli season.

He, too, was clearly engaged in a sport he loved, but was doing so as a 58-year-old man who could not have possessed the reaction time of an elite sporting youngster such as Hughes.

Where the Australian was wearing a helmet and the wide array of body armour that is standard for the modern batsman, Hillel would have been wholly unprotected as he stood umpire.

Consider too that umpires are sometimes even closer to the batsman striking the ball than batsman are to the bowlers delivering it; consider that a ball struck in the middle of a bat can be travelling considerably faster than one merely released by hand; consider, too, the increased number of opportunities for deflection given that it may strike the bowler on follow through, the non-striking batsman or, as happened in this case, the stumps.

Something similar happened to my friend Sandy Scotland six years ago, to devastating, if not lethal, effect.

Sandy umpired alongside Hillel at a tournament in Italy in 2005 and renewed acquaintances with him a couple of year later when the Israeli came out of retirement to captain his country in a European Championship match played in Scotland.

He knows that only the grace of God prevented him from pre-deceasing his erstwhile colleague when he was hit and hospitalised a year after they last met.

??I was hit squarely in the eye and the iris still does not work,?? he said. ??Apparently if I had turned slightly and been hit in the temple I would have been killed.??

Sandy??s love for the sport is undiminished. As well as organising umpires for top matches around the country, he remains one of our leading umpires and I am not alone in having suggested that his diminished eye-sight has made no difference to his competence.

He is man enough to take such teasing but knows that the time is right to take serious note of this issue and draws comparison with the sport of baseball, which is often, unfairly, regarded as a dumbed down form of cricket.

??I think helmets for umpires will come,?? Sandy reckons. ??It seems an odd idea at the moment but I think it will become more likely in the future. I can remember when a batsman wearing a helmet seemed over protective.

??Baseball umpires standing behind the catcher wear an enormous steel helmet and chain mail to protect their chest.??

Admittedly there are other elements to consider, not least the physical demands of officials wearing such accoutrements for extended periods in summer temperatures.

While at top level there may also be increasing scope for technology to take over, there is no such option for the wider game and there are already too few prepared to officiate to begin to contemplate any sort of shift system.

Baseball clearly grappled with such issues generations ago, though, experimenting with forms of helmets in the 1920s and making head protection for batters compulsory in the fifties.

A legacy of Oscar Hillel??s death may be that cricket is forced to learn from baseball once again.