Homeworkgate and the shaping of Usman Khawaja

March 11, 2013. Usman Khawaja is awoken by a phone call in his room at the JW Marriott hotel in Chandigarh.

It’s three days out from the third Test in Mohali and a selector has already informed Khawaja that, after heavy losses in Chennai and Hyderabad, he will be playing his first Test for Australia in India.

But the call is a summons to an 8am meeting in the hotel conference room, where captain Michael Clarke, coach Mickey Arthur and team manager Gavin Dovey sternly inform Khawaja that because he and three others have not submitted a “homework” assignment to Arthur in time, they will be suspended from the Test.

Khawaja, 26, walks out of the room in a daze. His summary ban for failing to carry out the task is the result of a management meeting the night before, where Clarke and the entire touring staff have discussed poor results and more broadly slipping team standards.

The other three banned players are James Pattinson, Mitchell Johnson and Shane Watson. By drawing a contrast with Watson for the travelling Australian media a few hours later, Arthur does not miss Khawaja.

“I’ve not ever been in a position to doubt Shane Watson the person or Shane Watson the cricketer,” he said. “Usman Khawaja is different. This will be the catalyst I think for Usman Khawaja to realise we’re pretty serious in the Australian cricket team.”

Said Dovey: “In the context of this series to have four players we think disrespect the coach and disrespect the team … We couldn’t be soft.”

Ten years later, Watson is president of the Australian Cricketers Association, Johnson a broadcaster, and Pattinson playing club cricket. Arthur was sacked a few months after the episode, replaced by one of its staunchest critics, Darren Lehmann. Dovey stayed in his role until early last year.

Khawaja is finally about to play his first Test match in India, and can look back on the episode with the sort of clarity that has helped him become, at 36, a hugely respected player and person in international cricket.

“Our priorities at the time were a bit wrong,” Khawaja tells The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald ahead of the first Test in Nagpur this week. “We were more worried about the box-ticking stuff for players, rather than actually ‘hey, are we a skilful team’.

“At that point we weren’t a more skilful team than India, and that’s why we lost. We didn’t lose because we weren’t fitter than them, we didn’t lose because we weren’t a better fielding side than them, we were just not as skilful as they were.

“All the coaching and support staff with Mickey at the top were trying to concentrate on all the other things, but that wasn’t the reason we were losing.”

In missing the third Test alongside Watson, Khawaja opened the door for a young Steve Smith to be recalled and show the first signs he would become an international cricketer of substance, if not quite the acknowledged genius of 2023.

But as he reflects, a lot of young cricketers were left floundering at times back then, in an era where hard work was the major prescribed method for anyone struggling. Aside from a later debrief with Clarke, Khawaja felt even more of an outsider than he already was.

“It was already tough enough for a new guy to fit in the team,” he says. “And when something like this happens, it just made you feel like you were more of an outsider.

“We had the homework stuff, then I went over to England, and we lost that series again. I played three Test matches, scored a 50 in the first one at Lord’s and a couple of 20s but couldn’t convert, was struggling to find my feet, as a lot of us were. ‘Hughesy’ [Phillip Hughes] was too, and ‘Smudge’ sort of broke out in that Ashes.

“After I got dropped from that, it wasn’t very fun either. You always feel when you’re dropped, especially when you’re young and back then, that you don’t feel part of the team anymore. Because you know as soon as you’re dropped, you’re out, you’re not going to be back any time soon.”

The India suspension and the England demotion, combined with Khawaja’s wider experience of a team environment very much in thrall to the greatness of an earlier era, left him actively disliking the idea of playing for Australia again.

“When I came back, I really wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be in that environment again, because the environment wasn’t fun,” he says. “Whether I was scoring runs or not, it will definitely impact on how you feel and how things were going. But it wasn’t just about runs, it was about everything else.

“Even before the tour started it was very high intensity. There was a lot of tension going into it from players, even the training sessions before the tour started were ‘do this, run here, do that’, it was just way too intense for how intense international cricket already is. It did make me not want to be back in that environment. All those reasons.

“But whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, so you’re always better off for it at some level.”

What emerged for Khawaja out of that crucible was a realisation that his life and happiness could not be defined by cricket alone. These thoughts, championed by the captain Pat Cummins in recent years, are much more commonly articulated now.

But a decade ago, it took courage for Khawaja to take that tack when he had already been singled out for supposedly lacking the work ethic of earlier generations.

“I made a pact with myself that I refused to let my happiness in my life just be dictated by cricket,” Khawaja remembers. “A lot of players are getting better and doing that, but back in 2013 when it happened, no one really talked about this.

“Everyone’s livelihood was dictated by how many runs they got, how many wickets they got and whether they won games or not. I wasn’t going to let Cricket Australia, cricket in general or anyone dictate my happiness. I was quite strong on that when I came back, and I had to work hard on it.

“That early stage, 10 years ago almost now, I said back then I’m not going to let them dictate my happiness, there’s more to life than cricket. I’m going to train, do everything I can to become a better player, but in the end the results of the game aren’t going to dictate whether I’m happy or not. I think that’s where it started.”

That attitude, anathema as it was to how the homework saga had been handled, generated a very different Khawaja the next time he played Tests for Australia in the summer of 2015-16.

In addition to more boldness about wearing his culture and influences on his sleeve, he also had a clear idea of how he wanted to go about a blooming relationship with his now wife Rachel, whom Khawaja also met in 2015.

Khawaja’s emotional expression of gratitude to Rachel for her “unconditional love” was a moment to remember when he claimed the Shane Warne Trophy for Australia’s best men’s Test player last week.

“When I met Rachel, she had no idea about cricket,” Khawaja says. “Then she started to learn more and more about it, and getting more involved, and I just said to her early ‘look, I love the idea that you’re getting involved in cricket, but when I come home, the last thing I want to do is talk about cricket, last thing I want to do is come home and be a cricketer. When I come home I just want to be a husband, and then when the girls were born, I just want to be a father and a husband. My life, yes I play cricket a lot and my life is surrounded by cricket 90 per cent of the time. But this is going to end at some point like everything does, and I’m not just a cricketer. I’ll spend most of my life, hopefully, not being a cricketer’, so that was really important.

“I said ‘all I need is love from you, that’s all I really care about and all that really matters to me’. Once she understood that, she’s always supported me whatever happens. And at a personal level that’s all I really wanted from my wife and hopefully my companion for a very long time.”

If returning a decade after his suspension to play a Test match in India sounds like the completion of a circle for Khawaja, then it is also one for Australia. Where once, through hard training or harder penalties for players, they tried to force a result on one of cricket’s toughest road trips, now the plan is much more about freshness, flow and recognition that anything is possible.

“At some level when you look back, you realise we were just trying too hard,” Khawaja muses. “Coaching staff, everyone at the time trying too hard and not realising India’s going to be a very tough place, particularly for young cricketers to go out and perform.

“We’re such a mature team now, where even the support staff is very mature, played a lot of cricket, they’ve been coaches for a long time, they understand how to get the best out of players. And we know that sometimes you can do everything right, prepare the right way, and it doesn’t mean the result will go the right way.

“Those guys who were playing in the early 2000s, they were greats of the game, guys who’d played so much cricket, they were experienced and had played 80-90-100 Tests, prettymuch where a lot of our batters and bowlers are getting up to now. You can’t just buy that experience.”

Success in India is by no means guaranteed. But with a decade of knowledge behind them, Khawaja and his teammates know they are far less likely to trip over their own feet this time.

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.