‘This is what you dream of’: Usman Khawaja reveals Ashes moment that made him emotional
Usman Khawaja has revealed the Ashes moment that made him feel overwhelmed, how he has dealt with the ups and downs of team selection, and the role faith and family play in his life.
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Usman Khawaja knew what it meant to him when he pumped his fist and leapt down the pitch, a century on his return to the Australian Test cricket team safely in his pocket.
And he knew what it meant to his wife Rachel, who was overjoyed clutching their 18-month-old daughter, Aisha, somewhere Khawaja, despite his best efforts, couldn’t quite spot near the sight screen of the Sydney Cricket Ground on January 6.
It had been a long 18 months to get his chance in the baggy green again after being dropped from the squad following the 2019 Ashes series. He’d become a father and worked diligently as Queensland captain, while Rachel, his biggest fan, picked up the slack at home in Brisbane to allow him the space to hone his batting through extra hours in the nets.
But what he didn’t grasp, and still can’t quite understand, was how much his recent centuries – the first and, incredibly, two days later his second – meant to Australians.
“It was just an unbelievable thing I didn’t think would happen, for it to work out the way it did, come back into the team and score 100 first innings,” Khawaja, 35, says.
He’d scored his first century just before the tea break on day two of the fourth Ashes Test against England, and remembers the wall of noise hitting him as he walked towards the sheds.
“The whole crowd was chanting ‘Uzzy’ and I thought, ‘it probably doesn’t get much better than this’. This is what you dream of when you’re a kid – to have 40,000 people chanting my name walking off. That’s the support, and I still don’t understand where it came from, but that’s probably the thing that will stick out to me the most.
“Even the lead-up to it, I could feel the sense of how excited everyone was for me to play. I’d never experienced anything like it in my life.”
There had been a palpable groundswell of support for Khawaja during the series. Cricket fans had caught glimpses of the figuratively lighter batsman as twelfth man and cheered effusively as he danced on the boundary at the Adelaide Oval.
The weight of selection seemed to have lifted from his shoulders, and the cricketer, the first Pakistani-born and Muslim to represent Australia, who had always spoken eloquently about race, inclusion and religion, became the incumbent and modern comeback kid weary Australian fans needed.
When he got his chance in Sydney, a lucky break after Travis Head tested positive for Covid-19, they cheered him into the middle, erupted with every boundary and collectively celebrated his success.
He scored 137 on day two before being bowled out by Stuart Broad and two days later, in a Saturday scoring spree, hit an unbeaten 101 to become the third man in history to score a century in each innings of an SCG Test.
It was a milestone he shared with Rachel, who was pictured in the stands holding Aisha up towards her father.
But the outpouring of support from Australians long accustomed to underdog heroism was so far-reaching that by the following Wednesday even legendary singer-songwriter Paul Kelly had shared an ode to Uzzy’s resilience.
“I felt like for me it was a very special moment but for him to write that, and for the way people were reacting, I felt like I shared that special moment with everyone else,” Khawaja says.
“You give a bit of happiness back to other people and you don’t realise the effect it has on them until Paul Kelly writes you a song.
“That’s what sport does for a lot of people; it’s entertainment, it provides the opportunity to get away from life. That’s the beauty of it.”
Khawaja has only just finished replying to the messages, which flooded in by the hundreds, when we arrive at his Brisbane home a little over three weeks after his twin century milestone.
He played the final Ashes Test in Hobart and finished the Big Bash season with the Sydney Thunder before returning home, eager for a break with Rachel, who is six months pregnant, and their daughter Aisha. His suitcase, clad with airline tags and stickers, is still propped upright by the side of the bed.
“We just spend time at home together (when Usman is back) because we don’t get to do a lot of that,” Rachel, 26, says.
“Out in the yard, by the pool – it’s the simple things for us.”
They moved in last July, having traded their inner-city home for the outer suburbs to better suit their growing family. A gated drive leads to an expansive home, with plenty of lush grass for Aisha to run around on with her parents, hitting golf balls with her dad, and a pool they cool off in daily.
Scattered moving boxes, furniture yet to be arranged and a TV waiting to be mounted on the wall hint at the chaos of the summer of cricket and the many months spent travelling.
There are also plenty of toys amid the crisp white and charcoal finishes.
Aisha, the culprit, is sent into a flurry of giggles when the family’s cavalier king charles spaniel, LeBron, nuzzles her cheek, and when Rachel brings out her daughter’s tiny Australian cricket jersey, the toddler points to the name on the back. “Dadda,” she declares confidently.
“She says that every time she sees cricket on TV now after the summer, even women’s cricket,” Rachel laughs.
It was Aisha’s first time on tour with her dad in the past month and it’s clearly made its mark. Although Khawaja corrects us that her mother is definitely her favourite, Rachel expertly diagnosing the meaning of every cry, whimper or grimace.
“She’s got a lot of personality for an 18-month-old,” Rachel says.
“Definitely gets it from her dad,” Khawaja smiles back.
“She’s just happy; she’s fun and interactive, she runs around, she’s always smiling. You can’t ask for much more.”
It’s unsurprising that Khawaja, who had always wanted a family, credits his wife and daughter for his change in mindset since he last played for Australia in 2019.
Born in Pakistan, Khawaja moved to Australia with his family when he was five.
He grew up in Sydney, played his first game for NSW in 2008 and made an eye-catching debut for Australia during the 2010/11 Ashes series.
His international career ebbed and flowed in the following decade, a masterclass in the uncertainty of Test selection, and after the 2019 series, during which he struggled to get off the mark, he lost his place in the squad.
Unexpectedly, West Indian cricket great Brian Lara, Khawaja’s cricketing idol, contacted him to offer advice on his cricketing future.
“He reached out to me and said, ‘do you want to chat through anything?’ and I said ‘yeah, of course I do’,” Khawaja recalls of his fellow left-handed batsman.
“He talked to me about batting, about Test cricket, which was really nice of him; he didn’t have to do it. It was always really special that he did that.”
In January, Lara shared a video of Khawaja’s century to Instagram, in a surreal moment for the Aussie batsman.
“I guess he probably felt a little bit a part of that journey,” Khawaja says.
With Lara’s advice in mind, he had turned
his focus back to Queensland in 2020, a domestic side he’d captained since 2015, and to his family, with the couple expecting their first child that July.
“I was just working on my game, doing the extra hours, not so much because I was like, ‘I want to play for Australia again,’ but because I wanted to make sure I was still giving it everything that I have,” Khawaja says.
“As a professional athlete, as soon as you start taking shortcuts, that’s when things don’t go your way.”
“Rach has been awesome for that,” he adds.
“Giving me the opportunity to go out there and train and not having to worry … she’s handled it so well that it’s made my life a lot easier.”
Khawaja met Rachel through a mutual friend in 2015 and proposed on her 21st birthday the following year during a horse and cart ride in New York.
Knowing his desire to raise a family in the Islamic faith, Rachel, raised a Catholic, converted to Islam in 2017 and the couple married in Maleny, on the Sunshine Coast, a year later.
They welcomed Aisha in July 2020, fortunately during the cricket off-season, and had three months to settle into a new routine before Khawaja left again for his domestic cricket duties.
“You don’t really remember it. You see a small baby now and think ‘Was Aisha really that small?’” Khawaja laughs.
“I’m sure it was a lot harder than we remember.”
“And we’ll probably remember when the next one comes,” Rachel adds, referencing her baby bump.
“I always thought it’d be nice if he could play one more game for Australia just so (Aisha) could be there,” she says.
“But I think we both just got to a point where we were really just grateful for the career he’s had and everything he’s already achieved and just kind of accepted that would be it.
“He just became really content with that. He loves playing for Queensland and they won the (Sheffield) Shield last year, so we moved on to family life and focused on her.”
Khawaja worked on technical aspects of his batting – nothing he wants to give away to his opponents – but insists there was no magic pill.
“I was just really enjoying my cricket, that helped, and having Aisha around, I come home and it’s a bit of fun and it takes you away from the game, which is really nice,” he says. “There’s a bit of timing there, too.
“It was a consistent long period of time; it wasn’t an innings or a few games here and there. But it’s like anything, you can score runs and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll play for Australia.”
It was after an ordinary day at Queensland training, just ahead of the summer of cricket late last year, when Khawaja walked through the front door to find Aisha proudly presenting him with a pregnancy test, a surprise Rachel had orchestrated for her husband.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing with that?’” Khawaja laughs.
“I was going to put it away but as I walked out I saw the (positive) pregnancy lines. It took us a while (to fall pregnant with Aisha) so I’d looked at enough tests to know what it meant.
“I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ and (Rachel) said, ‘I think so’. It was a really nice surprise.”
They’d wanted their children to be close together in age, but they’d only just started trying to fall pregnant, so they were incredibly grateful it happened for them so quickly.
They shared the news to social media in December, days before Khawaja was named in Australia’s Test squad for the Ashes series in his long-awaited recall to the national side.
It had been a tumultuous lead-up to the series for Australia. Captain Tim Paine stood down amid a scandal and Pat Cummins was named his successor, while the team grappled daily with the complexities of Covid rules, positive cases and exemptions.
Khawaja was named twelfth man and took his place on the sideline as the reshuffled team began the series in Brisbane.
There had often been sentiment that Khawaja had fewer lives than other Australian batsman in the minds of the national selectors but he doesn’t worry himself with decisions he can’t control.
“I’ve been picked and not picked, dropped and then picked,” he says.
“I’m really relaxed whether I agree with it or not and 100 per cent I haven’t agreed with all selections in my career. Some I actually have.”
“I think you’ve definitely become more relaxed the last few years,” Rachel interjects.
“Rach is my wife,” he laughs.
“And she’s my number one supporter. She’s very biased, which I like. I’m the same when one of my teammates or friends is wrongly done by, and I laugh about it because I think that’s probably what Rach feels like.
“You just have to move on because you don’t want to be that guy sitting there whingeing about how you didn’t get selected and how tough life is for you.
“I’ve always been big on that,” he adds. “I’ve tried not to air my dirty laundry out too much in public. I’ve also been quite firm in saying what I believe and standing up for what I believe and I think people respect that, too.”
There was a notable difference, though, when Khawaja emerged as part of the Ashes squad. He was running drinks for bowler Josh Hazlewood on day one in Brisbane when the right side of The Gabba stood up and cheered.
He was taken aback. He’d never experienced that before and, heartened, he decided to play along.
“I went the long way around the boundary and the crowd was getting up again, I was waving to them, jumping around,” Khawaja smiles.
“I came back and sat down and the boys were like, ‘what the hell was that?’ And I was like ‘the people love me now, I don’t know’.”
Khawaja had often been surprised when people mistook him for a serious person. He is a proud joker and prank artist and he was determined to show that side of his personality this summer.
“When I was in the Australian team for a long time, I took it really seriously and I still do, representing Australia is a big honour, but at the same time I’m probably a bit more relaxed now,” he says.
“I always enjoy fan interactions in other sports and I thought, ‘When I come back this time I’m not going to be so rigid, I’ll be more what I’m like in Queensland rather than what I was like probably beforehand’ because I’ve had so many people tell me how serious I was. That’s not even me.”
By the second Test in Adelaide, again the crowd cheered wildly as Khawaja carried drinks around the field. He couldn’t understand it, but when he returned a few overs later, so did the applause.
“I thought, ‘I’ll give them something,’ so I did a little dance,” he says.
While he can’t pinpoint a reason for the groundswell of support, Rachel has a more observant view of her husband.
“I think that’s why everyone was so happy for him when he got an opportunity because he really embraced twelfth man duties and was having so much fun with it and I think everyone could see that,” she says.
“It felt like the whole nation was behind him. Before he even got any runs, day one (at the SCG) when they named the team on the screen, the cheer Uzzy got was so loud. You really felt the support.”
Rachel had joined her husband with Aisha in Melbourne for the third Test in the series. He relished the chance to be in the team without the stresses of playing on Boxing Day, coming home and giving his young family all his attention. The trio then travelled to Sydney
so Khawaja’s parents could spend time with Aisha, having been separated by Queensland border closures for eight months – but Australia was three wins up in the series and Rachel hadn’t expected her husband would get a chance to play.
When Head tested positive for Covid-19, Khawaja was the obvious choice to replace him and with barely a day’s notice he was back on the scorecard, batting at number five.
“You couldn’t have scripted it any better for Uzzy in terms of the circumstances,” Rachel says.
“The team was doing really well, which is what you want. To have an opportunity come up through Covid is pretty spectacular, rare and probably something that won’t happen again.”
The top order had struggled to get off the markand by the end of the first day, Khawaja was padding up and heading back out to the crease at the SCG.
“I wasn’t too bad until I went out there that night,” he laughs, offering a refreshingly honest account of his nerves during the first few deliveries.
“I went, ‘Oh, OK, I remember, this is Test cricket again’. In my head I just thought, ‘It’d be nice to just get one run, so I don’t make a fool of myself, just get off the mark’. Then I hit a boundary, for a four, and I’m like ‘OK, now at least you’re not going to get a duck’.”
After stumps was called on day one – Khawaja not out for four – he resumed play the following day with effortless confidence.
“The game itself felt very normal,” he says.
“Honestly, the biggest difference was the support I got from the outside and the crowd. I felt so much more support than normal.
“I got my 50 and they were going berserk and … not thinking I’d make 100 because centuries in Test matches are very rare, I just enjoyed that moment. And then I just kept going and going.”
Rachel was astounded in the stands with Aisha, the knowledge her husband had a chance of scoring a century not kicking in until he reached 92.
She hadn’t packed enough nappies, not expecting to be at the grounds all day, and was down to her last as he reached the milestone shortly before the tea break.
The families had been seated in a different area near the sight screen because of Covid restrictions and Khawaja, celebrating on the pitch, scanned the crowd but couldn’t find his family. It was later that he saw the footage from the Channel 7 coverage of Rachel, overjoyed and holding Aisha in the air with gleeful jumps – a sight which prompted Lion King memes, of Rafiki holding Simba, to flood her social media.
“I love watching that,” Khawaja laughs.
On Saturday, as Khawaja neared the milestone again, Channel 7 cameras picked up a nervous Rachel chasing after a runaway Aisha.
“She didn’t want a bar of it,” Khawaja adds.
“Years gone by I’d be sitting there nervously twiddling my thumbs. But this time it was a good distraction and a big perspective,’’ she says.
Khawaja’s twin centuries weren’t enough to clinch the SCG Test, which ended in a draw. It was after the win in Hobart on January 16 that Australia was able to celebrate the 4-0 series victory against England.
As the champagne corks began to fly, teammate David Warner gestured to Khawaja, who doesn’t drink alcohol because of his religious beliefs, and he quickly left the podium. He’d experienced the same issue throughout his career, including after Australia’s 2019 Ashes win.
“You won’t see me in any of those pictures,” Khawaja says.
“I was sitting on the sideline and I was totally fine with that. It’s my choice to do that so I have no issue.” But, noticing a baggy green was missing, Cummins had the champagne bottles set down and all the players called Khawaja back – an important moment Khawaja shared on social media after the game.
“I think it’s a really big step not just for Australian cricket but for Australian culture in general,” Khawaja says.
“For a long time there’s been alcohol in celebrations, and I’ve never had an issue with that … but for them to stop that and bring me in just shows that inclusivity.”
Growing up in a subcontinental family, Khawaja says he and his peers always found it difficult to connect with the Australian cricket team, which he says didn’t reflect the multicultural community around him.
He has been working behind the scenes with Cricket Australia over the past few years to help encourage a more inclusive environment, and that moment, he says, showed the efficacy of that work.
He also believes Cummins, who “respects everyone for their beliefs and what they are and who they are” is the right person to lead the team for that reason alone.
“The writing is on the wall. When you look at the Australian cricket team and who has been representing Australia and then you look outside, it’s not representing what we are as a community, as a great multicultural country,” Khawaja says.
“So something is getting lost in the middle, because there are plenty of cricketers from multicultural backgrounds … and at some point you just think, ‘well, whatever we’ve been trying for the last five or 10 years is probably not enough or not the right things’.
“That’s where I’ve been really strong with Cricket Australia. We need to think slightly differently about how we are going to do this. The beauty of that is there is buy in from everyone all the way from the top to the players in the Australian cricket team, which is great.”
Khawaja’s astounding Sydney comeback hasearned him a spot in Australia’s squad for the tour of Pakistan, the first in 24 years and Khawaja’s first chance to tour his birth country. With the tour running from March 4 to April 5, he has to be prepared to miss the arrival of his second child, due in April.
But the Khawajas tend not to think too far ahead – they are hardened by the surprises of Covid and the unpredictability of selection by now.
They are keeping the sex of their second child a surprise, as they loved doing with Aisha.
When I ask if they have any gut feelings, though, Khawaja laughs to Rachel, who playfully rolls her eyes: “Uzzy has convinced himself it’s a boy.”
“I just like stirring her up, to be honest. But last time I thought Aisha was a girl,’’ he says.
“I’ll let you know,” he adds.
“If I get it right, I definitely have the magic.”
As if the 40,000 fans chanting at the SCG, and the many more across Australian lounge rooms, needed further convincing of that.
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