Usman Khawaja’s innings wasn’t just good – it was something truly special

T here are times, on a placid batting pitch, when a good performance can’t win you a match but the lack of one can lose you a match. There are times when a good innings is an achievement that belongs on the standard tier, but continuing it elevates it to the realm of the special.

When Australia lost two wickets relatively quickly in the final session of day one in Ahmedabad, having chosen to bat in the fourth and final Border-Gavaskar Test, a position of 170 for four could easily have become an insufficient total on a surface where the threat level was beige. By the time the next wicket fell about 22 hours later, Usman Khawaja and Cameron Green had made that score 378 for five, wearing down India’s bowlers for the lower order. When the Australian innings was said and done, the team had made 480 and taken two days out of the game.

Someone had needed to do the job for Australia, and two someones had. Khawaja’s effort grew more astonishing with each passing hour. By the time his vigil had ended – five sessions and change to collect 180 runs in heat that was stifling and relentless – it was no surprise that it was his longest innings by any measure.

More than that, it climbed the charts. Of all those on record, only 10 Test innings in India had ever exceeded his 422 balls faced. Only nine had bettered his 608 minutes. Those metrics are incomplete due to partial scorecards, but the records still cover well north of 6,000 attempts. Khawaja batted more than 10 hours, not just scoring runs but hoping to push India’s batting deeper into the game where the pitch might begin to deteriorate.

There was something very reminiscent of his Dubai effort from 2018, where the temperature was dry and over 40 degrees compared to the humid