Just for a split second, in the moments after I woke to the news that Phil Hughes was in a critical condition having been struck by a bouncer, and before the reality of the situation kicked in, I had a vision of poor David Hookes and the manner in which he lost his life after being punched by a hotel security guard.

But Hughes was not out and about at night, he was at the Sydney Cricket Ground batting for South Australia, well set, with 63 runs on the board, when he attempted to pull a short ball from the New South Wales seamer Sean Abbott, was hit towards the back of the head and collapsed.

In a way, it sounds innocuous: Abbott is not a fast bowler in the strictest sense – although the ball remains as hard whoever delivers it – and scarcely a day’s cricket goes by these days without someone having the gong sounded, as cricketers like to put it.

In those terms, what has happened to Hughes, who was struck behind the ear, and stood briefly before collapsing, is a terrible, freakish accident.

There is a curious paradox in cricket involving the protection cricketers wear now compared with the lack of it in the mists of time. Thus, the better protected they are to the head, the more they seem to get hit: to the extent a blow on the head is accepted as a perfectly normal, generally low-risk hazard of the game that often brings little more discomfort than a ringing in the ears and produces a leg bye.

Since the development of helmets, and their increased technology – from the early incarnations first of motorcycle-style, then those with sideflaps akin to that of a baseball batter, Perspex visors, and now today’s streamlined hi-tech things – accidents such as that suffered by Hughes are almost unheard of. Mostly they are cuts or abrasions, such as that suffered by Ricky Ponting at Lord’s in 2005, or the ball that sneaked through the grille of Stuart Broad’s helmet and produced a memorable photograph that made him look like an early candidate for Red Nose Day.

The nastiest incident I have seen this millennium involved the England bowling coach David Saker, who, playing for Tasmania, got a ball to spit from a length to hit the South Australian opener Jeff Vaughan, who was poleaxed and scarcely played another match. So nasty was the pitch Darren Lehmann and Greg Blewett then added 386 for the second wicket.

But the oddity is that in the days before World Series cricket and the advent of the helmet, fewer batsmen got hit on the head, despite the bouncers bowled. There was the dreadful occasion in 1962, when the India captain Nari Contractor was felled by Charlie Griffith in Barbados, where there was no sightscreen and he said he was distracted by a window opening. Contractor suffered a skull fracture, was unconscious for six days and never played again.

There was the Sydney furore in 1971 when John Snow pinned Terry Jenner, and in 1975, the New Zealand tailender Ewan Chatfield was hit by a short ball from the England pace bowler Peter Lever, was knocked unconscious and might have died had the England physio Bernard Thomas not realised that he had swallowed his tongue, could not breathe and that his heart had stopped.

The bowler was distraught: “I honestly thought I had killed him as I saw him lying there in convulsions. I felt sick and ashamed at what I had done and all I could think when I got back to the pavilion was that I wanted to retire.” Beyond Hughes, his family and friends, spare a thought then for what young Abbott must be going through.

I witnessed a few nasty ones. There was Rick McCosker having his jaw broken in the 1977 Centenary Test and batting later bandaged like the Invisible Man. The previous summer, I had helped Dennis Amiss from the field at Lord’s after Michael Holding had split open the back of his head, and then – towards the season’s end – sat in the England dressing room as he returned to the side and made an emotional double hundred.

The most disturbing was in 1977 when Colin Croft, then of Lancashire, hit Ian Gould so badly he was knocked unconscious and taken to hospital. The surprise was that Gould, head bandaged, far from being kept in for observation, came wandering into the Tavern that same evening to order his habitual lager-top.

The idea of head protection seemed as absurd then as it would be not to have it now, so when first Sunil Gavaskar and then Mike Brearley had plastic skull protectors made to fit beneath a cap, they were ridiculed. Brearley went to the extent of trying to disguise his side-pieces by gluing hair on to them to look like sideburns.

Batsmen were less minded to take on the short ball but instead kept their eye on it. Pictures of what appear to be near misses are nothing of the sort but rather a head swayed just far enough out of the way: smelling the leather.

Helmets, for all their necessity, have made batsmen think differently. Now they are inclined to pull and hook regardless, push forward rather than play back, and for many of those who do not, the default reaction when the ball is dug in is to duck first and turn the head away rather than watch. It is a kind of complacency. What has happened to Phil Hughes might just sober them up.