Usman Khawaja into the match breaking the inner sanctum of the Australian cricketers

The son of an Indian Muslim, Nasser Hussain played his first Test match for England in 1990 and was named captain in 1999. It was another 12 years before Australia named its first and still only Muslim player: Usman Khawaja. Only two Indigenous men have ever played Test cricket for Australia: Jason Gillespie and Scott Boland. More than 460 men have played Test cricket for Australia, just under 99 per cent of whom have been white.

It’s an embarrassing record that helps explain why even now, nearly two decades after Khawaja began shrugging off his distaste for the Australian team, many younger Australians of South Asian background still can’t get behind the wrinkled green.

I met three guys yesterday who said Good luck to India [the location of the next Test series] Uzzy, we hope you kill it. But we would still support India, says Khawaja. I started laughing. They were apparently children of Indian origin, but I asked where were you born? and they said Australia.

I was like: Come on man! Support me, support Australia, what are you doing! I’m here, representing you!

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There is a note of frustration in Khawajas’ tone as he tells this story. He tells me there were no Muslim or South Asian role models in Australia when he was growing up in the 1990s, and he clearly wants the next generation to see him as someone who is looking for a path forward to make room for more people. like him. But having shared the views of the Australian team at their age, he understands their reluctance to chant Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.

It’s an issue he brought up with his teammates as well.

Ahead of the first Test against the West Indies [late last year] I was talking to my friends about how much loved in Australia, white Australia, but not necessarily the rest of the population, he says. There is still such a large continental community that loves cricket that does not support the Australian cricket team.

As the first South Asian-born Muslim Australian Test cricketer, it would be easiest for Khawaja to keep his head down, share general platitudes about Australia’s great cause and not rock the boat. But while he clearly loves Australia and playing cricket for the national team, he doesn’t think he’ll be silent about the country’s competition problem and its impact on cricket.

He has regularly shared stories of his experiences with security, who often do not believe he is a member of the Australian cricket team, even if he has his gear. In the most recent Test match at the SCG, where he scored a personal best of 195 runs, he told me security was watching him, even as he walked with the rest of the team, clearly unsure of his belonging.

These stories, as depressing as they are, can be strangely empowering to those who have experienced the same. If even an Australian test taker is being racially profiled at work, we may not have imagined it when we feel judged or treated differently in our workplaces, social settings or even on the street.

Khawaja says he does not blame individuals for such encounters, but points to the fact that because Australian cricket has been synonymous with whiteness for so long, many people find it hard to believe that a South Asian would actually be a part of it.

So is that changing? Not really, according to Khawaja.

You see cricketers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, from all over at the junior level. But when you get to high performance, it just goes down exponentially. It just falls, falls, falls.

That’s where I’m trying to work with Cricket Australia, saying, Look, guys… you’re putting a lot of money into this, but it’s not going well. You’ve been doing it for 10 years and nothing has changed.

Khawaja is clear about what the main problem is: the overwhelming whiteness of cricket administrators, selectors and coaches.

Because at the high performance level, you don’t understand it, but many coaches do [and] the dials are white, he says. There is an unconscious bias. If you have two cricketers, one brown, one white, both the same, the white coach will pick the white cricketer just because he has a son who might look like him. He is familiar with it.

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It’s a depressing but accurate summary of the situation. Cricket Australia’s entire board is currently white, as are all selectors and senior coaching staff.

But it also begs a key question: has this lack of diversity at the highest level of the Australian cricket body affected Khawajas’s own career, especially given the controversial years he spent not being selected for the national team?

I should have been selected for the teams many times, but I wasn’t, he says directly. But it just gave me a bigger chip on my shoulder.

As well as working with Cricket Australia and the players’ association to increase diversity at all levels of the game, Khawaja also aims to reach out to underrepresented communities.

In one episode of the second season of the Amazon Prime Video series Test, Khawaja is seen visiting a Muslim school in Brisbane to share his experiences of racism and help inspire students to try cricket. He sees his involvement in the show, a fly-on-the-wall style documentary series that captures raw moments in the dressing room and among the team, as an important part of dismantling Australian cricket’s inner sanctum.

We go through the same things that the majority of the population goes through, he explains. And when you break it down, and people can relate to that… I think it’s really, really massive.

If anything, he wished the show was even more unfiltered, telling me he texted the show’s directors asking them why they had edited out his infamous conversation with former coach Justin Langer in 2018 before a series against Pakistan in the UAE.

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There were a few more f-bombs, he says with a laugh.

Expect Usman Khawaja to talk about the changes needed in Australian cricket, be it on screen, on social media or in conversations with his teammates and coaches.

We have come a long way, he says. But I keep doing it because I want people to know what it’s like.