Cavalier Usman Khawaja relishes magic moment in Karachi

Chances to make Test centuries don’t come around very often. Excellent careers might include five or 10. Each innings starts from nothing and gradually climbs across hours, with every rung gained being the one that might break. However placid the pitch, however rich the vein of form, it only takes one good ball, one mistake, one lapse of concentration, piece of bad luck, umpiring error, fine piece of fielding, and the count collapses back to zero.

When Usman Khawaja gloved a catch at Pindi Stadium for 97 last week, the odds were against him getting another chance at a century in Pakistan. Best case the tour had two matches to come, and at the age of 35 he had no prospects of visiting again. If he had achieved the feat there would have been a simple and satisfying circularity to his story: born in Islamabad, where the first Test was played; growing up in Sydney, and became an Australian national cricketer; then at last a trip back to Pakistan to raise the bat in triumph in front of a crowd that would simultaneously be home and away. The joining of tides, the closing of the circle.

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This chapter of Khawaja’s story would also have been shot through with brighter and more complicated strands of meaning. A player from one of the migrant communities that make up so much of Australian local cricket but so little of the overwhelmingly white professional scene. In a Test team whose players of colour across 145 years barely tally a handful. A leading member of the first Australian side to visit Pakistan in since the last millennium, finally coming back.

Of course a century is arbitrary, and it made no cricketing difference whether Khawaja got