Geoff Lawson confident cricket's aggression will return Geoff Lawson says helmet design could be better. Photo: Fairfax media Former Australia fast bowler Geoff "Henry" Lawson does not doubt cricket will continue to be played with it's trademark aggression, but he has welcomed the fact that bouncers were not bowled in the Test match between New Zealand and Pakistan following Phillip Hughes' death. Lawson, the NSW team's fast bowling coach, was at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Tuesday afternoon when Hughes was hit on the head during the Sheffield Shield match against South Australia and said he, like others who knew the popular 25-year-old, was affected by the tragedy. He was also aware that a bouncer, the type of ball that hit Hughes, was not bowled on day two of the Test match between New Zealand and Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates. While he described it as a "touching" gesture, Lawson suggested the game would return to it's old self. "That was incredibly touching, the minute's silence from two teams half a world away to honour Phillip Hughes" Lawson said. When [New Zealander] Daniel Vettori bowled that first over, I half expected him to walk off. But they had to get through that day and both sides did. When someone got out, there was no reaction from the players. It was like, 'yeah, that's a wicket, move on'. It was a lovely gesture and symbolic [not to bowl bouncers] but I'm 100 per cent certain it won't continue in that fashion. 'Own fault': Geoff Lawson's jaw was broken facing the Windies in 1988. Lawson said cricket had endured tragedies in the past but on Saturday, when junior cricketers around the nation honoured the memory of Hughes, the former Test opener who would have turned 26 on Sunday, he used some rough calculations to highlight how unfortunate Hughes was. "I vaguely went through some numbers in my mind for how many games of cricket are played every Saturday around Australia and I had a random figure of 10,000," he said. There's about a million balls, maybe more, bowled every Saturday in Australia, there might be 50,000 bouncers bowled every Saturday in Australia. You do the numbers and the one that caused the death . . . and it is so terrible . . . you don't want a knee-jerk reaction and make rules for exceptions. Lawson, who took 180 wickets in his 46 Tests, had his jaw broken in 1988 by West Indian Curtly Ambrose, at the time one of the world's most feared fast bowlers. However, Lawson blamed himself for that accident. "I wore a borrowed helmet and it didn't have a grill on it [to protect my face], which was my mistake because I always nearly batted with a grill on," he said. I'd been hit when I was a night watchman in 1982-83 but I was a tailender and [other than that] never got hit because my instinct got me out of the way. The one thing that can be done [in light of the Hughes accident] is to change the helmet designs. I played in the era when they didn't have helmets. We played against blokes who bowled seriously quick - and short - but you didn't back away from that, you walked out to the middle and excepted what was coming. They changed the rules about the [number of] bouncers bowled [per over] but there's always been intimidatory bowling.