In 2016, he appeared clueless against spin at the venue. Almost nine years on, he disrupted spin with a wide range of shots
Andrew Fidel Fernando29-Jan-2025For Australia teams of a certain era, tours to South Asia were hardship postings. We’ve all heard the stories. The facilities were sub-par and the pitches questionable. The sun was hot. The humidity was icky. The butter chicken didn’t taste anything like in the local curry house in Sydney.The 1986 Dean Jones 210 story from the tied Test in Chennai (then Madras), for instance, features dehydration, mid-pitch vomiting, involuntary urination, smells emanating from a canal, and later in that Test, dodgy umpiring. Saline drips, blood, sweat, beers – these were the fluids of a subcontinent tour. (Sometimes you didn’t get beers)Usman Khawaja has been on tough tours. One in Sri Lanka was almost traumatically bad. In 2016, Australia were spun out six times, and Khawaja had the most memorably disastrous outing, in Galle. On the same Thursday, he fell for 11 to an offspinner’s arm ball in the morning, before leaving almost that exact same delivery to be bowled for a duck, in the final hour of play.It’s 2025, now, though, and things have changed. Modern-day Khawaja is different. He runs at spinners. He reverse-slaps them. He hits over the top. He turns even hard-spun well-flighted deliveries into scoring opportunities, coming down the track and whipping through midwicket. There’s no hardship in this posting. Khawaja’s on 21 off 29, then you blink and he has sailed to fifty. Once shellshocked and inert at this venue, the current version of Khawaja is proactive, calculated, and dynamic.Related
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Because this was a Khawaja innings, the first boundary was a soothing cover drive. But we got past the niceties quickly. There was a trek down the pitch to bang offspinner Nishan Peiris down the ground in the sixth over, a six off the same bowler a few overs later, then the reverse-sweeps when Sri Lanka bolstered their protection down the ground and left the square boundaries open. There were laps, conventional-sweeps, and when his manoeuvring forced bowlers to pitch short, the thundering pull through midwicket. Once he’d been mauled by spinners here, now he was manipulating them.Khawaja’s path here is instructive. Following those 2016 Tests (he was dropped for the third match), Khawaja watched George Bailey reverse-sweep Sri Lanka’s spinners to good effect in the ODI series that followed, and was desperate to add the shot to his game, as revealed to journalist Andrew Ramsay. If there is a single shot that substantially improves your batting against spin, the reverse-sweep has got to be high on the list. Suddenly, you can hit balls pitching tight in line with the stumps through point, or behind square on the offside. It’s a shot that makes captains change fields, and bowlers switch up their lengths, even subconsciously.There is also shifting wisdom. Where once, batting advice around surviving in South Asia centred around defence (“come all the way forward, or go right back against spin” etc), the focus is now on attacking and adding run-scoring options. Force the bowlers to defend instead. At times, Sri Lanka’s spinners bowled leg-stump lines to Australia’s batters, mainly to slow the run rate. Khawaja still found ways to collect frequent runs into the outfield, while Steven Smith at the other end also batted in high gear.Usman Khawaja and Steven Smith hit centuries to establish Australia’s command•AFP/Getty ImagesTheir progress was far from easy, of course. The morning was as still and humid as any day is likely to get at this venue. There was still significant turn from the surface, even if it was the slow, less dangerous kind. Travis Head set the standard for fun pretty high crashing 57 off 40 in the first 80 minutes of play. Khawaja was more measured with his aggression, but kept the vibes flowing as he reaped runs from shots he couldn’t play nine years ago.”Me and Heady both went after them a little bit,” Khawaja said of the opening passage of play, in which Australia scored rapidly. “I took the offspinner over his head a couple of times, and Heady was doing what Heady does, and we both put pressure on the bowlers in our own way and got the field spread out.”Later, alongside Smith, with whom Khawaja shared an unbroken 195-run stand in which both batters completed hundreds, Khawaja settled into rapid accumulation mode. Of his 147 runs on day one, only 46 came from boundaries, and he was still striking at 70 by stumps.”When you’re watching from the sidelines, people don’t pick up all the nuances,” Khawaja said of that phase of his innings. “You don’t know what I’m trying to do, how I’m trying to do it, or what I’m thinking. There’s a lot going on.”On the banks, and in the stands at Galle, as Australia had almost the perfect first day of a series, Australia’s fans outnumbered the locals, and Khawaja scripted a Galle redemption story, it almost felt as if a glorious Australian Test cricketing summer had been transported to Sri Lanka. At no stage did it feel like hardship.