There have been many stories of players shifting from their birth country and ending up playing cricket for the country they migrated in. Such is the case with Usman Khawaja as well as the talented left-hander shifted to Australia after being born in Pakistan.

Khawaja became the first Muslim player to play for Australia when he made his debut in the 2010-11 Ashes series. Usman states that he was termed ‘lazy’ because of his Pakistani background and there is a huge stereotype in Australia where they believe that subcontinent people are not as hard-working as they are.

“I always had that ‘lazy’ undertone when I was growing up and I think part of that was my relaxed nature but part of it was also because I was Pakistani, and subcontinent people were seen as lazy, not doing the hard yards and whatnot,” he told cricket.com.au.

The top-order batter added that running and sprinting is something that doesn’t come naturally to him and he wasn’t as good as everyone else was at this particular exercise.

“Running has never been natural to me, so when we used to do lots of fitness testing I wasn’t as good as everyone else. When you put that against where I was from, that did play against me.” Khawaja added. 

He also talked about the diversity in the game and stated that Australia is on the right track but there is still a lot of room for improvement.

“If you look at the landscape in terms of multicultural cricketers around, we’ve got a few subcontinent cricketers (but) we’ve still got a long way to go. When it comes to diversity, I think we’ve been okay at it but we’re still just not quite there,” he said.