It’s unusual for people to hope that their own team loses a wicket, but it does happen. When a player is thrashing around as the overs dwindle, or plying a forward defence for hours when you’re not batting for a draw. Plenty of Indian batsmen have heard excessive good cheer from their own fans if their dismissal heralds the arrival of Sachin Tendulkar or Virat Kohli.
Usman Khawaja wouldn’t have hoped for it, but when a wicket went down within five overs of Australia’s innings against New Zealand, the misfortune also did him a huge favour.
David Warner and Aaron Finch have now tallied over a thousand runs between them at this year’s World Cup, and have got Australia off to some enormous starts. But the openers’ success has left Khawaja in an awkward position. When Steve Smith has been used at first drop, Khawaja has been bumped down to parts of the batting order that he’s never even seen on the internet.
Unsurprisingly for someone who has spent his career in the top three, he hasn’t looked comfortable walking in with overs diminishing and fast scoring required. At times he has found ways to contribute: he has chipped and slashed and forced, swept and reversed, but at times it has felt like Homer Simpson being mistaken for a pilot.
Of course Khawaja can fly a plane, so that exact scenario wouldn’t be disastrous either. It’s not like he can’t play white-ball cricket, either. During early 2016 he batted in god mode, carrying the Sydney Thunder to the Big Bash title on his own bat, then excelling for Australia in the World T20.
On an achingly slow pitch in Dharamsala where everyone was caught on the boundary trying to force sixes, no Australian hit a four except for a couple from Glenn Maxwell’s inside edge. No one except Khawaja, that is, who drove, clipped and pulled off that surface like it was the serenest Adelaide Oval of old.
But when he has excelled it has come opening the batting, where the fielding restrictions suit his mix of dot balls and boundaries, and the ball is new and coming down at pace. On his recent reintroduction to the ODI team Khawaja found his way to that position again, and embarked on the most prolific scoring run of anyone in the world this year before the World Cup.
Making way for Warner’s return put a spanner in the works of that run machine. But at last, on a used wicket at Lord’s against a fierce opening assault first from Trent Boult and then in tag team from Lockie Ferguson, Khawaja found a situation that suited him. If he’s been battling for runs and batting ugly during this tournament, it turns out that was exactly what Australia needed.
Australia needed a first drop who could come in when things were rocky, and stay in when things hit a reef. Khawaja needed time to settle into an innings, and room to grow it without worrying about the clock or the overs or the need to make 350. On a slow and difficult surface, any score would do. And while he had fortune with a couple of dropped chances, Khawaja was able to provide.
We can’t say that nobody could time their shots on that surface, because then came Alex Carey. Khawaja’s main accomplice arrived with Australia at 92 for 5, in the 22nd over. If this was a opportunity for the first drop to express himself, it was the same for the wicketkeeper-batsman. During this tournament, Carey has come in late in the day with a few overs to go large. Here, he had a broader canvas.
Accordingly he toned down the frequency of his attack, but didn’t eschew it. And he did it in a way that no one else could match. Drives through cover, slashes through point, and the unencumbered exuberance of his pull shot all cracked off the bat, and he cruised to his fifty at a run a ball in a match where most batsmen languished at strike rates between the 40s and the 60s.
What really stood out is that Carey looks like he’s having fun. So many batsmen in this World Cup have turned their batting into a grim stodge, grinding along at subterranean run rates even when a run chase tells them they’re behind the asking.
Carey suffered that fate when he was trialled as an opener during the last Australian summer. He tried to play the responsible circumspect role, stifling his scoring rate and circumscribing his scores. But back down the order, with the freedom to dash, he’s growing with each innings and making the role his own. His 71 was his highest score to date, of the three fifties he’s made in his last nine innings.
Khawaja couldn’t have been any different, with his 88 coming from 129 balls. But both parts contributed to a century partnership, and both to building an Australian score that New Zealand never challenged. For both sides of the partnership, what really worked was clarity about the job in front of them. In conditions where ambition had to be modest, doing a job was enough.
