Usman Khawaja wonders whether we’ve ever met. “No?” he says as he shakes my hand. “That’s probably a good thing, I used to hate journalists.”
Khawaja laughs, smiles, settles into his chair and makes me promise not to stitch him up in the headline. “The thing is …” I say. “I know, I know,” he replies, then adds, in an imitation whine: “‘I don’t write the headlines.’”
Khawaja has copped a lot of bad ones in his time. He has had more lows than most, been dropped seven times in his 12-year Test career. “I want to say I’m one of the most-dropped players ever.”
And I have just asked him about the worst of them. It was 2019, Australia’s last Ashes tour. Khawaja finally felt he had established himself as a senior player in the team. He had a Test average just north of 40, although it was declining each time he got caught behind, which kept happening.
“But I still felt I was in the top six batsmen in the country.” The selectors disagreed. In the past Khawaja had been “quite reflective and circumspect” when he was dropped, but this time he was “genuinely angry”.
He was 32 and was sure his Test career was over. “It was the hardest year. People have had it a lot tougher than me, I know, there are so many worse things in life than getting dropped in cricket, but at the time, it does feel like the worst thing.”
Eventually, his thinking changed. “I was like ‘All right, cool. Well, I played 44 Tests and that’s a lot more than many people get to play.’ If you look through the list of great Australian cricketers and there’s so many who are around that 40 to 50 caps mark who I think of as legends of the game, and there was my name right beside them.”
He found contentment. “Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. No matter how bad life is you can always be grateful for something. I could still play cricket, I can still play for Queensland, I can still do the thing that I love doing.”
He smiles again. “And then Covid happened.” He grins and claps his hands together in prayer: “Thank you, Covid.”
After almost three years, he was recalled for the fourth Test of the 2021-22 Ashes, at Sydney, when Travis Head tested positive. Khawaja made 137 in one innings and 101 in the other.
Since then, he has been batting better than ever: 160 against Pakistan in Karachi, 104 in Lahore, 195 against South Africa in Sydney and a 180 against India in Ahmedabad. And now here he is, back in England again.
“People talk about my resilience, but my resilience revolves around my faith. It is the only thing that has got me through being dropped that often. I would not be here where I am right now without it.”
Khawaja was the first Muslim to play for Australia. He doesn’t talk about it too often. “I understand that a lot of people don’t believe in God, and don’t have the same beliefs that I do.”
And he doesn’t want to press his faith on anyone. I wonder, too, if it was easier to keep it private. “Yeah, it is personal. One thing I love about Islam is that there’s no middle man. You’re responsible for yourself and your relationship with God is between you and God.”
Khawaja inherited his faith from his parents, who moved to Australia from Pakistan when he was five. But that is not why he still has it. “I question everything, including Islam. I’m not one of those people who are religious because my head is in the sand. I go seek answers.”
Khawaja is smart. He is a qualified pilot with a degree in aviation and is studying for an MBA. He loves science. “Nothing excites me more than studying how the universe works. People find that odd because they imagine religion doesn’t mix, but that’s so far from the truth.” It helps, he says, that his wife, Rachel, who was raised a Catholic, converted when she married him.
“She sees things from a totally different viewpoint. In the past I’ve done things just because that’s how I’ve always done them, so when she asks: ‘Why do you do this?’ and I’m: ‘Ah, I don’t actually know. That’s a really good question. I’m going to look into that.’”
He has been unpicking the Hadiths, deciding which he thinks are valid, and reading up on Christianity and Judaism, “because they’re all Abrahamic religions”.
Khawaja has the rare gift of being able to talk about all this without being pious. He is impish, mischievous, quick to laugh about himself and everything else. After years of study, his creed seems to come down to two things, one is an abiding sense of gratitude that, for instance, he even got to play 44 Tests. The other is a belief in fate: “That what’s meant to be, will be.” Which isn’t to say he doesn’t believe in choices: “Just that the choice we make in this moment is the same we would have made at any other time.”
I check my watch. We’ve been talking for eight minutes and deep into a discussion about the existence of free will. That habit of questioning everything is there in his cricket, too. There is a scene in The Test, the behind-the-scenes documentary about the Australia cricket team, when Khawaja is brave enough to explain to the then head coach, Justin Langer, that the team are intimidated by him, while the other players sit in awkward silence.
“I’ve grown up as a coloured cricketer in a very white Anglo-Saxon country and a very white Anglo-Saxon cricket team,” he says. “I mean, how many players of colour have represented Australia? Barely any. Andrew Symonds was one, but he was as Australian as they come. He had the most down-to-earth, lovable bogan charm about him. No one ever thought him anything other than Australian. But me? I stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t drink, I fast, English was my second language, my name is Usman Khawaja. When you think of an Australian cricketer you do not picture me.”
Coming up that way meant, he says, he got used to having hard conversations. “I had to learn to have confrontational dialogue with teammates and other people without it escalating. So I have no issue in dealing with conflict, because I’ve done it all my life.
“I’ll always stand up for what I believe in, again because of what I’ve experienced throughout my life. So when no one else was speaking to JL [Langer], someone had to. I knew what the guys were saying about him when no one else was around, but they were afraid to say it to him. So if no one else was going to do it, I was.”
Odd thing was, he says, “me and JL were closer than anyone because he respected me for it. He knew if I said something it was going to be to his face, not behind his back”.
The cultural differences he is describing sound, I say, similar to some of the same issues in English cricket. Khawaja has paid a fair bit of attention to them. He knows Azeem Rafiq, he played with him at Derbyshire.
“There’s always two sides to every story, but there’s no doubt in my mind there was some form of discrimination and you may call it racism in some respects,” Khawaja says. “I always joke around about it with my mates. I’m quite happy to openly talk about it. I always used to talk about the ‘old white Englishman’.” He is laughing as he says this.
“I’ve dealt with a couple of them and they haven’t been very kind towards me. Sometimes they don’t even know what they’re saying. They’ve just grown up in a different generation.”
Khawaja says he has had to face a lot of the same things in Australia. “Luckily, my teammates were always respectful to me. But I always felt like an outsider. I don’t drink. And I don’t buy guys drinks. But I’ve no issues with people drinking alcohol, either, it’s your life, do whatever you want to do. I respect that and they respect me.”
The game is changing, he says. “It’s about accepting that everybody is different. If somebody doesn’t want to drink, or doesn’t want to buy you a drink because they don’t believe in it, that’s fine, if someone wants to eat meat, if someone doesn’t want to eat meat, it doesn’t matter. We need to celebrate differences.”
He is playing a part in it himself. Khawaja has set up a foundation offering free cricket clinics. “When I came to Australia I didn’t know a word of English,” he says. “I went to kindergarten when I was five and the teacher asked me: ‘How are you going?’ and apparently I replied in fluent Urdu.
“But I played sport, from day one. I was playing handball, I was playing footy, I was playing cricket, and it just showed me, it didn’t matter where I was from, what language I spoke, what colour I was, sport just broke down all those barriers.”
With the foundation, he wants “to get people from low socioeconomic backgrounds, refugees, immigrants, anyone, involved with sport”.
But first the Ashes and the pressing question of whether he can, at last, master batting in English conditions. He says cheerily he has no real idea why his form has been the way it is. “Cricket is just that kind of game, it goes up and down, up and down. Hopefully, I don’t experience a down again, but odds are I will. If you play long enough you always do. That’s just the crux of it.”
It is, he admits, a mystery that’s beyond even his enquiring mind. I wonder if that’s why he loves it so much.
