Usman Khawaja and the century he never expected to happen
This was all a bit different. And that isn’t just a reference to the scenes preceding play in Ahmedabad which included the respective Prime Ministers of the two countries, Narendra Modi and Anthony Albanese, being driven around the boundary while the captains waited in the middle for the toss.
This was different because the team that started the first day batting finished the first day batting. The ball did not rag past the edge; wickets did not fall in clumps; batters did not fear for their existence in the middle. For the first time in the series there was a wicketless session.
It was a batting day. And Usman Khawaja did a lot of batting. When he clipped the first ball of the final over through midwicket off Mohammad Shami, it brought his 14th Test hundred and the sixth since his return to the Test side last January.
Twin centuries on his comeback, a hundred in his homeland of Pakistan and now this innings. Each of the multitude of milestones Khawaja has achieved over the last 15 months has held a lasting significance, but this one had an extra edge. Now he has a Test century in the country where he couldn’t get a place in the starting XI on Australia’s two previous tours. Across the three subcontinent tours in the last 12 months he averages 74.16.
“I don’t think I’ve ever smiled so much on getting a century, there was emotion in it, I’ve done two tours of India before, carried the drinks for eight Test matches before I got a chance here,” Khawaja said. “Throughout the middle of my career I got told I couldn’t play spin and that’s why I never got an opportunity to play in India.
“It’s just nice to go out there and tick off a hundred in India which was something if you asked me five years ago if you told me that I’d think you were crazy. There was a lot of emotion, I just never expected this to happen.”
When Khawaja went past 212 balls faced it became the longest innings of the series, overtaking Rohit Sharma’s century in Nagpur. By the end of the day, having faced 251 deliveries, it was longer than three of the completed team innings for the series.
