Usman Khawaja believes greater diversity in Australian cricket will develop in time.
Firdose Moonda in Perth31-Oct-2016The C-word – chokers – used to be South African cricket’s least favourite topic of discussion but these days it’s the T-word as well. The two T-words. Transformation. Targets.Even before they were officially re-introduced in September, those words sparked serious interrogation over whether sport has the responsibility to make amends for the social costs of South Africa’s segregated past, whether enough opportunity was afforded to all and why the national team had such a vastly different demographic make-up to the actual nation.But South Africa are not alone in debating diversity. Australia, a country with a culture that seems built on winning at all costs, is also tackling the issue and for Usman Khawaja, they still have a way to go.”Australia is an extremely multicultural place, especially where I grew up in western Sydney,” Khawaja said. “I’d love to see players from all different backgrounds come and represent Australia and I think you will see more and more of that.”Khawaja is what South Africans would call the only “player of colour” in the current Australia squad and remembers a time when he felt like the only one on the circuit. “When I first started playing first-class cricket, I am pretty positive I was the only coloured person in the whole system and now you see it a lot more,” he said.He expects that increased immigration will change that, albeit not immediately. “Australia is still a fairly young nation in terms of multi-culturalism and immigration, particularly towards people from Africa and the subcontinent coming over. It’s still first or second generation,” he said. “I expect that to happen but it will need a little bit of time.”I have no doubt there will be some new faces coming into the team in the next 10 or 15 years but they will obviously have to earn their stripes. We already see it through young development players and players coming through first-class cricket.”The brothers Ashton and Wes Agar, Gurinder Sandhu, Fawad Ahmed, Arjun Nair and Clive Rose are a few examples but so far none of them have broken through to quite the same degree as Khawaja. That may make him a flagbearer of sorts but he does not see it as giving him the same responsibility as that carried by someone like Makhaya Ntini, South Africa’s first black African player or Temba Bavuma, the first black African batsman to play Test cricket. Both those men are regarded as role models for the majority population group, who have long played cricket but have often been denied access to circumstances that could encourage them to excel.”I have never seen it that way,” Khawaja said. “There is a little bit more emphasis on trying to get people from different backgrounds involved in cricket and to make it a national sport. I think you can aid that process but you can’t artificially manufacture it.”Ultimately, that has been the biggest question around South Africa’s transformation policy: whether merit would be sacrificed to support change, whether that would be justified, and even whether the suggestion of that was insulting to those whom the policy would benefit. The answers remain unclear to everyone, including Khawaja, although he has made an effort to delve deeper into it.”I talked to a couple of the South African players, I talked to Hashim about it and he has explained to me from a South African point of view,” Khawaja said. “I can totally understand both sides of the spectrum. It’s a complicated issue.”It’s one of those things where you would love to see South Africans come through to Test cricket and just pick the best team and not have to worry about any of the external factors and hopefully in a few years time, that will be the case. But it’s also a very young nation in terms of where it has been and where it is now in terms of Apartheid so you have to take that into consideration.”South Africa themselves are starting not to separate the need for transformation with the desire for success. After they blanked Australia 5-0 in the ODIs, Faf du Plessis told fans they can calm down about the so-called quotas because South Africa have proved they can win with a transformed team.In that series, South Africa met their targets but bigger challenges await. South Africa have yet to play a Test under the new policy and have yet to go a whole summer with it in place. The real results can only be measured once they do. Until then, they may take some comfort from knowing other places are grappling with similar ideas and the goal of inclusion is not theirs alone.
