He lives on the other side of the world but there is very little likelihood of Sean Abbott being asleep when you read this.

Abbott is a cricketer and, more specifically, a fast bowler. His job is to get a batsman out using the most frightening and intimidating means available to him within the laws of the game.

Bouncers - balls that are pitched halfway down the track in order to bounce in the region of a batsman's head - are a major part of the fast bowler's arsenal, and Abbott bowled the perfect bouncer on the first day of the Sheffield Shield match between New South Wales and South Australia.

It was the kind of delivery that in any other circumstances would have had qualified commentators purring in admiration. In any other circumstances the ball might have been described as a rip-snorter or a hum-dinger.

But for that to have happened, Hughes would have had to play the bouncer the way he has been trained to: hook or glance it away with his bat, fend it off with his gloves or duck or weave to avoid it altogether. Instead, he aimed to hook it but missed and turned his head at the last instant, taking the full impact on the side of his head just below the ear.

A batsman 'wearing' a short-pitched ball on his person is not uncommon in first-class cricket. Hughes staggered around in the typical manner as players jogged in to check on his condition. Then he fell on his face, and the jog became a dash, and then the appeals for help became increasingly frantic as the NSW players and the umpires realised the batsman was seriously ill.

Within hours the Australia international was in an induced coma, and his life in the hands of a surgeon trying delicately to reduce the pressure on his brain caused by the damage to his skull. Within a day or two we will know if Hughes has a chance of surviving, and if so to what extent this head injury will dictate the rest of his life.

Imagine, as many cricketers did through the medium of Twitter today, how Sean Abbott is feeling. He was doing his job and doing it well. And if Phil Hughes dies he will have to live the rest of his life knowing that he killed a man by doing his job well; that, had he unleashed any other type of delivery in that moment, Phil Hughes would still be alive. No amount of empathy and support from the likes of Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist will make him want to project another ball at another man's head.

Not long after the match in Sydney was abandoned, all the players involved in the game were offered counselling. Counselling might help, but it is hard to escape the reality that the two careers that became tragically intertwined at the Sydney Cricket Ground may have suffered irreparable damage.

Will Hughes, if he resumes his career, ever be able to face a short ball again? He is famed for his battling qualities, so perhaps he will. Perhaps it is easier to be brave when it is your own life on the line. It seems less likely that Abbott, 22, will be able to steel himself once more to test a batsman's reflexes with a 6oz piece of leather-bound cork.

Such speculation may seem insensitive to the Hughes family. But there is an overwhelming sense that this is an epochal moment for cricket, similar to when Ayrton Senna drove into the wall. Hughes is no ordinary talent - a brilliant and pugnacious cricketer and popular, too. When heroes die, a piece of their sport does with them.

So without wishing to pre-empt anything, what has to change to make sure this doesn't happen again? Can cricket be made safer without being emasculated? If the bouncer is outlawed, the famous Atherton v Donald clash becomes something played out back in the days when the game was different, tougher, more dramatic. Another nail is banged in the coffin of West Indies cricket, which completes its journey from relevance to heritage. Bodyline becomes prehistoric, but still relevant because for all the warnings that were heeded as a result of that grotesque assault on the game's ethics, a man still died because cricket failed to protect him.

Paul Hoffmann, the fast bowler from Townsville in Queensland who led the Scotland attack between 2002 and 2007, would like to see an improvement in helmet technology. Whatever happens to Hughes he cannot begin to imagine how Abbott is going to go back to doing what he does best. The inference is that this incident has wrecked a career. That alone feels like sufficient justification for change.

"I definitely think the helmet should cover the area where Hughes got hit," Hoffmann told Herald Sport. "There's not enough protection behind and just below the ear. It just needs an extra inch of protection to cover the back and side of the skull.

"If it was me [in Abbott's position], I'd struggle to bowl another bouncer for a while. Mentally it'll be very tough for a bowler to come back from that. Boxers whose opponents either died or suffered brain damaged never fully recover. Their 'killer instinct' is gone."

Hoffmann, a boxing fanatic, added that he was aware of the irony of that phrase - killer instinct - being applied to cases where sport has the potential to claim lives.

As the cricket community prays for Phil Hughes to recover, the game's governors cannot afford to do what Formula 1 did after the death of Roland Ratzenberger at Imola and blindly carry on. A knee-jerk reaction is surely better than none at all.