Usman Khawaja: ‘I would not be where I am now without my faith’

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