A part but apart: why Usman Khawaja was an Aussie cricketer like no other

This is not the obviously striking thing about the striking career of Usman Khawaja. We will get to that. But this does stand out that his 88th and final Test is only the 37th he has played against England and India, Australia's two biggest and most prolific modern rivalries. Only, because it represents the second-lowest proportion (only Michael Hussey's is lower) of Tests against those two among Australian cricketers this century who have played at least 60 Tests.

On the one hand this distribution is random, a result of Khawaja's career zigzagging, stop-starting its way to this point. But on the other, I can't help but see it speak a little to the apartness of the career Khawaja has carved out compared to his peers. Modern Australian players are increasingly defined by their feats within the Big Three ecosystem, in which most end up playing half or more of their Tests. Khawaja, as well as featuring irregularly in those contests, is not as abundantly - narrowly? - defined by them.

When we think, say, of Steve Smith, we recall primarily his feats in the Ashes or the Border Gavaskar Trophy (24 of his 37 hundreds are against those two); conversely with David Warner, we caveat with a relatively lean record in those contests.

Khawaja has left behind a wider - let's call it a more cosmopolitan - collage by which to remember him. Saving a Test in an empty Dubai stadium. Fending off a rampant South African attack of Kyle Abbott, Vernon Philander and Kagiso Rabada under lights for a pink-ball hundred. Marking his breakthrough century against Tim Southee, Trent Boult and New Zealand. A resonant hundred in the country of his birth. His only double, in Galle. Overall, 11 of his 16 hundreds have come against non-Big Three opponents. As careers go, it is a throwback to an older age, when careers were more diversely challenged, and thus more rounded; when learning to play spin wasn't just doing it in the BGT in India, and swing wasn't just in the Ashes in England.

And so, despite being the game's most elite specimen - the Australian male Test cricketer - he's always felt more a part of cricket's proletariat. Us, not them. He calls himself the people's champ, half-jokingly yes, but the remaining half is not such a piece of self-aggrandisement.

His batting was a proper throwback, the contrast with the game around him sharpening with each passing day of late. Full-sleeved and top button done up (an ode to '90s G-Funk style rather than 1950s cricket fashion, is my hunch), often accessorised with the chunky sleeveless sweater, retreating in his crease like he was going back to a bygone time, waiting for balls to come to him because, well, that is what they always do.

Which is not to say it was dull or unappealing. Far from it. Khawaja in flight was a compelling sight. The pull shot figures prominently in the Australian batting canon but none were as mannered or elegant as Khawaja's version. His had a swing to it, a little like Lara's, and entirely absent of the alpha-male violence of Ponting's or Hayden's pulls. It's what got people cooing, though I was always more partial to his very, very late cuts, crouched down and leaning back, the lateness allowing him to better pick those gaps.

Give or take some modern exceptions, the inherent fragility of batting has always hung heaviest on its openers, a sense that was never far from the start of a Khawaja innings. He could be a bit handsy outside off, or get stuck too deep in his crease. There were times he would get right in front of the stumps to flick through leg but play so late, the bowler's arm was almost up in appeal. But that sense of jeopardy and vulnerability made him more endearing. Openers end up carrying the deepest scars in this format, never alone when walking out but more often than not, among the very first casualties trudging back alone. He's got a few to show for it, as he admitted at his farewell press conference. The reward, though, is an average of nearly 50 while opening. And also, ultimately, a place in that broader Aussie strain of charmingly idiosyncratic batting styles, alongside the Gilchrists, Hugheses, Labuschagnes, Warners, Heads and Smiths. In his own distinct way, of course, which is rather the point.

The lasting impression, nevertheless, might be of stillness, not of the body but of an inner self, of the kind in evidence during that first-innings 29 in the Boxing Day Test. Stillness in a storm, or the stillness implied by Kipling, in keeping his head where others around him were losing theirs. For nearly 80 minutes he stayed put, defending, leaving alone, getting beaten, rinsing, repeating; he alone showed on that first day that the pitch was not what some harum-scarum batting made it out to be. Had it not come in a loss, or a dead rubber, or in a Test so eager to wipe itself from memory, we might even remember it as the mini-est of mini-classics.

The most striking thing about Usman Khawaja, however, is always going to be that a man named Usman Khawaja played 88 Tests for Australia. Nearly a hundred Tests as the first Pakistani-heritage Muslim cricketer for Australia: nothing stands him apart as much as that sentence alone.

Not least of his achievements, wrote Gideon Haigh in tribute, was that he almost made us take him for granted. Almost but thankfully not quite, because it's necessary that this career is not taken for granted. Khawaja has made sure it will not be, from the moment he spoke up for the first time about the racism he suffered growing up in Australia and working his way through the pathways. He was only 24 Tests into his career then - in October 2017 - and it took some spine to put himself out there and straight into the toxic sludge of this particular culture war. In some ways his journey to that point is the learning, from being desperate to fit in early on, to eventually understanding that it was more important to be true to himself and let the environment adjust to him.

He was doing it to the last, expressing the belief in his final press conference in Sydney that the commentary around his preparations for the Ashes, and his subsequent injury, was inflected with racial undertones. That wasn't without substance, given that his team-mates had also played golf before Perth and not faced as much heat, or that it has also been how he has prepared for a while.

But this talk hasn't been the sole propelling force in the broader discussions around his position. His form - averaging 32 since the end of the 2023 Ashes, with one hundred - and, more pointedly, his form at this age, as well as an ominously looming transition, means that kind of talk is only natural. As natural as it is for Khawaja to not see that decline as terminal, because that's just not how elite athletes are programmed. For them a change in fortune is always round the corner, as indeed it was for Khawaja in Adelaide.

It distracted from the rest of the press conference, a warm, expansive and straight-speaking reminder of the significance of his career. A reminder of the inherent challenges that remain in forging another such. A reminder that his path to this point is unlike those of the vast majority of Australian male cricketers before him. A reminder that the personal is political, and that an athlete like Khawaja speaking from his personal experiences on matters seen as forbiddingly political is not something to censure but to nurture. A reminder, finally, of all that stood him apart, in the hopes of seeing more like him once he's gone.