Warner leads reaction to Hughes tributes

So unprecedented has the past fortnight been, Australia's players admitted they were unsure how they would react on the opening morning of this first Commonwealth Bank Test.

As it turned out, David Warner reacted the way he always has in the face of adversity – by hitting the ball to the fence.

Warner, one of Phillip Hughes's closest allies in the Australian dressing-room, had held his little mate's hand when he was taken from the SCG on a medicab two weeks ago.

Quick Single: First Test match report

This morning, with Hughes's Test number close to his heart, and the initials 'PH' embroidered on a black armband strapped around his left bicep, Warner channelled the spirit of his late friend with a lightning start to the opening session.

Having burst out onto the ground, leaving his opening partner Chris Rogers behind him, Warner lunged forward to the very first ball he faced and, while not quite to the pitch of it, punched it to the cover boundary.

He flayed his fourth ball through point, and sliced his sixth past gully to make it three boundaries in the over.

He found the fence three more times in the following over – once over point and twice more through the covers – as Australia passed 30 inside the first three overs.

Then, having evaded the first bouncer of the series – a lifter from Varun Aaron that was warmly applauded by the Adelaide crowd – Warner found the rope again, lifting another short one over gully.

It was hardly a regulation start to a Test match, even for Warner and his flashing blade, but it was one that Hughes would have approved of.

Barely ten minutes earlier, skipper Michael Clarke and his team had walked out into the Adelaide sunshine to pay an emotional tribute to their 13th man.

The players stood in single file and faced a packed members' area, as the team's support staff stood arm-in-arm on the boundary line.

After a video tribute narrated by Richie Benaud was played on the big screen, 63 seconds of applause, in recognition of Hughes's final innings, reverberated around the new stands of this famous old ground.

Clarke, who has bared his soul to a sympathetic nation over the past fortnight, wiped away more tears.

Back out in the middle, perhaps Hughes's words, so beautifully re-told by Clarke at the batsman's funeral last week, were ringing in Warner's ears midway through the opening session, when the opener seemed to take stock and re-assess after his rapid start.

Dig in, Hughes used to say, and get through to tea.