Usman Khawaja has opened up on his complex relationship with Australian cricket and how he believes “subconscious” racial bias continues to impact the game in this country, all the way up to the highest level.
The Australian Test opener spoke in-depth to journalist Osman Faruqi for the Sydney Morning Herald, revealing how he didn’t support the nation’s cricket team growing up.
But among Khawaja’s most damning comments was that he feels that the cricket landscape in Australia still isn’t changing, with a lack of representation “at a high-performance level” a major concern for players of colour.
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“That’s where I’m trying to work with Cricket Australia saying, ‘Look, guys … you invest a lot of money into this, but something’s not going right. You’ve been doing it for 10 years and nothing’s changed’,” Khawaja told the publication.
He noted how people of younger generations from South Asian backgrounds still aren’t choosing to support the team of their birth nation in big numbers.
Asked what the problem is, Khawaja said that having the highest positions in Australian cricket — from administrators to selectors — all filled by white personnel was a major issue.
“There’s subconscious bias. If you have two cricketers, one brown, one white, both the same, the white coach is going to pick the white cricketer just because he has a son that might look similar to him. It’s what’s familiar to him.”
Khawaja’s assessment is accurate insofar as the entire CA board, national selectors, and the senior coaching staff are all white.
Khawaja himself remains an exceptional case. Few people of colour have risen through the ranks to play professional cricket for Australia, while Khawaja was the first South Asian-born player to play Test cricket for the nation.
Today, he’s still often reminded of Australian cricket’s overwhelming white majority.
Last month, he revealed on Twitter how he was regularly stopped by security to have his credentials checked despite being dressed in official team kit in the middle of a series.
“I got stopped 3 times last year at our hotel, while in Australian kit and asked if I was with the Australian Cricket team…” Khawaja wrote.
Khawaja was born in Pakistan and moved at a young age to Sydney, where he grew up and played cricket in the eastern Suburbs, notably with David Warner.
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He made his Test debut in January 2011, but the following 11 years saw him fall in and out of the Australian XI.
Khawaja has played 56 Tests, but for a player now averaging 47.83, and 79.68 since his most recent re-call in January 2022, there’s an understanding that he should have far more caps to his name.
Asked by Faruqi if a lack of diversity at the highest level has held him back, Khawaja said: “There’s been plenty of times I should’ve been picked for teams and I wasn’t.
“But it just made me have a bigger chip on my shoulder.”
Khawaja vowed to continue fighting for change within Australian cricket.
“We’ve come a long,” he said. “But I’ll keep doing it because I want people to know what it’s like.”
