Usman Khawaja shared the infamous Newlands dressing room with David Warner in 2018.
Five years on, as Warner appeared doomed to have a leadership ban over his role in the ball-tampering scandal from that Test against South Africa follow him around for life, Khawaja gave another timely dissertation on the value of second chances to set Australia’s day-night platform in Adelaide.
Notions of forgiveness, improvement and evolution can be hard to find in certain places and at certain times in 2022. In some corners of Australian life, Warner will always be the subject of labels in the vicinity of “cheat”. Never mind that Cricket Australia’s cultural review apportioned far wider blame.
Usman Khawaja has compiled more than 1000 Test match runs in 2022.Credit:AP
But as they looked down from the plush red seats in front of the South Australian Cricket Association committee room, Cricket Australia’s board directors were enjoying the innings of Khawaja, a player who, for vastly different reasons to Warner, had once also been harshly typecast.
Early in his career, Khawaja was criticised for not training hard enough, looked at askance by some teammates for choosing his Muslim faith over peer pressure to drink alcohol, and not considered to be cut from the right cloth for a long Test career.
How much these assertions were related to the colour of Khawaja’s skin, rather than anything more substantial about his technique or approach to the game, will remain a matter of conjecture, but there is no doubt he felt the epitome of an outsider.
By the end of the 2013 Ashes tour, having thought he would get a good run in a team that had recently lost the established talents of Ricky Ponting and Mike Hussey, Khawaja was at the point where he did not want to play for Australia anymore. He felt wrongly typecast.
“I’ve said numerous times that people told me ‘you’re not going to make it, you’re not going to play for Australia, it’s a white man’s game, they won’t select you’,” Khawaja said last year.
“There could have been plenty of times where I thought ‘nah this is too hard, it’s not going to happen, I’m not getting opportunities,’ but fortunately I’m very stubborn and I have quite thick skin and I just kept pushing, pushing because I love the game and I want to do well.”
When Khawaja returned between 2015 and 2019, he did things much more his own way, wearing influences from the NBA and elsewhere more obviously, and caring far less what people thought of him.
Nonetheless, he would still have seemed an unfulfilled talent had the harsh decision to drop him during a tour of England – immediately after he had captained Australia in a tour game at Derbyshire – made that Khawaja’s final series.
Where Khawaja’s previous evolution had been partial, the batter who was recalled for the Sydney Test in January had used another couple of years in domestic ranks to find a sweet spot where making runs and winning games had become the side effect of a happy life, not the cause.
Batting at a graceful, steady tempo all year, Khawaja has notched heavily influential runs against England, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the West Indies, with a return match-up against South Africa to follow. At 35, he is performing in ways that have impressed and in some cases confounded his former critics.
In Adelaide, Khawaja was pinned on the shoulder by the West Indian spearhead Alzarri Joseph, but responded by pulling his next short ball to Adelaide’s short square boundary.
His innings was another example of sound top order batting against a moving ball, setting up Marnus Lauschagne and Travis Head to take advantage as the pink ball aged. Khawaja’s exit, adjudged lbw to Devon Thomas from around the wicket, was debatable.
Usman Khawaja was struck by Alzarri Joseph but pulled his next short ball for four.Credit:AP
Through it all, Khawaja has been a steadfast friend to Warner, appreciating how his opening partner’s efforts to make his own evolution and improvement have been held back by repeated recourse to that 2018 Newlands dressing room and its secrets.
In that moment, Khawaja had famously asserted that the team should accept collective responsibility for what had taken place on the field, and stick together as the players had done during the pay dispute with Cricket Australia the previous year.
As it was, Khawaja did not carry the room and saw the vastly less experienced Tim Paine appointed Test captain the following day – another imponderable moment for Australian cricket.
Titled leader or not, Khawaja has carved out one of the most noteworthy Test careers in Australian history. In terms of the example he is setting for an increasingly diverse Australian population, none in the past 40 years has been more vital.
And much of it would not have happened without Khawaja’s own evolution, in line with the second chances granted to him by the national selection panel. Second chances that he and all his teammates now wish had been granted more readily to Warner.
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