Khawaja has used his profile and foundation to strive to eradicate the barriers he experienced, in the hope that more multicultural backgrounds will be represented among cricket’s upper echelon. “Unless you’ve lived through those experiences, it’s hard to relate. I’ve been called names – the classic ‘curry muncher’ – and [told] ‘you stink’, and they’d assume I was Indian … it was a lack of understanding, all those racial slurs and things you had to go through. “Once I played for Australia, you don’t feel like you fully belong at the start. I don’t want the next Usman Khawaja – male or female – to go through that same journey, they shouldn’t have to. “I think that’s one of the things that’s held cricket so far back. Look at the faces we have in the community of Australia right now, you walk through the streets and you see it, but we don’t see that representation in the Australian cricket team.” Asked about his dispute with Queensland Cricket, Khawaja chose not to comment. However, he did call for more multicultural representation in cricket’s coaching ranks, something he feels would address the lack of ethnic players reaching the pinnacle of the sport. He has witnessed the amount of investment that has gone into multicultural pathways, but stresses that with so little change in the elite landscape, the time has come to directly consult the people and families who might help shape how such programs could tap into the next generation.