Australia opener Usman Khawaja cannot remember if he “smiled” as he did after completing a very special Test hundred on Indian soil. It’s a feat he couldn’t have dreamed of, having carried the drinks on his previous tours of India in 2013 and 2017. Australia’s leading batsman on this tour, Khawaja batted for six hours to put down a quality strike. batting and scored an unbeaten 104 of the team’s 255 for four on Thursday. “I don’t think I ever smiled like that when I got a century, there was emotion in it. I’ve done two (Test) tours of India before (2013 and 2017). I carried the drinks for eight test matches before I got a chance here,” you could feel the pain and joy in his words.
The 36-year-old lost a lot of time as Cricket Australia tried out mediocre openers like Marcus North and Chris Rogers.
“Half way through my career I was told I couldn’t play spin and that’s why I never got the chance to play in India.
“It’s just nice to go out and tick off a hundred in India, which was something if you asked me five years ago if you told me I’d think you were crazy,” Khawaja don’t let you ask the question forget what it meant to him.
“There was a lot of emotion, I just never expected this to happen,” said the Islamabad-born, Queensland-raised cricketer.
So did he agree with that perception in Australian cricket that he couldn’t play a spin?’ ‘Maybe to some extent. But guess it was a self-fulfilling prophecy in its own way. People are starting to say that then perception is reality. Every time I got out to spin people would say ‘you can’t play spin’. I probably started to believe it myself,” he said.
Khawaja lamented that the Down Under cricket ecosystem never turned its back on him in the early days of his career.
“I didn’t really get the support of the people around me at that point. I didn’t feel like the team really supported me. I didn’t feel like the coaching staff and selectors really supported me on that journey. It was just made it so hard,” he was blunt.
“Whether it was me or not, yes, I’m a better spin player now, no doubt about that. I’ve got more shots, better defense. But I didn’t really get a chance to learn at that early stage.” So how did he turn the tables? “Luckily I’m pretty stubborn so I did my best to learn, then we had a couple of A tours here in India which helped a lot. Had to go back and figure it all out on my own.”
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