‘They’ll pick the white guy’: Usman Khawaja on race and smashing cricket’s inner sanctum

’s culture podcast. “I was like, ‘Well, why would I support this team that doesn’t support me?’

: Usman Khawaja. Only two Indigenous men have ever played Test cricket for Australia: Jason Gillespie and Scott Boland. More than 460 men have played Test cricket for Australia, just a touch under 99 percent of them have been white.Credit:It’s an embarrassing record that helps explain why even now, nearly two decades after Khawaja started to shrug off his distaste of the Australian team, many younger Australians from South Asian backgrounds still can’t get behind the baggy green.

As the first South Asian-born, Muslim Australian Test cricket player, the easiest thing for Khawaja to do would be to keep his head down, share generic platitudes about how great Australia is and not rock the boat. But while he clearly loves Australia and playing cricket for the national team, he doesn’t believe in staying quiet about the country’s race problem – and how it impacts cricket.

“That’s where I’m trying to work with Cricket Australia saying, ‘Look, guys ... you invest a lot of money into this, but something’s not going right. You’ve been doing it for 10 years and nothing’s changed’.”Credit:Khawaja is clear on what the main problem is: the overwhelming whiteness of cricket administrators, selectors and coaches.

“There’s been plenty of times I should’ve been picked for teams and I wasn’t,” he says bluntly. “But it just made me have a bigger chip on my shoulder.”

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