Fawad Ahmed: The step forward Australian cricket needs

On Wednesday, there is a very good chance that Australia will select Fawad Ahmed as its 442nd Test cricketer.

His arduous path up to this moment has been well documented: threatened by the Taliban for supposedly spreading Western values in his capacity as a cricket player and coach and contributor to an NGO championing womens’ rights; refused asylum by the Australian government at first instance; consigned to odd jobs as a labourer as he pursued a cricket career initially in the modest environment of a Melbourne metropolitan T20 competition.

But despite the travails that burden every refugee – the language barrier, the search for a job and income, the frustration of having your qualifications in your home country rendered superfluous in an atmosphere of tacit and unwarranted distrust for the intellectual capabilities of all foreigners from developing countries (Fawad himself has a Masters in international relations and political science from Pakistan, not that such a degree bears much weight in Australia).

He has also overcome his reduction to relative anonymity in a fiercely competitive cricket system in which it makes all the difference to have been earmarked and fast-tracked from the age of fourteen by coaches in high places.

As it were, he has overcome many of these obstacles by virtue of a supreme talent for leg-spin bowling in a country that has been, and perhaps will always be, frenzied in its desperation to find a worthy replacement for Shane Warne.

Were he to be picked, he would not earn many ‘first’ labels. He would be neither the first Pakistani nor the first Muslim to wear the baggy green; Usman Khawaja pipped him to that title by four years.

But unlike Khawaja, who grew up in Sydney and indeed was earmarked for greatness through those youth academy programs mentioned above, culminating in his appointment as Australia Under 19s captain in 2006, Fawad is an outsider.

He does not have the comfort of having played with or against all of his Australian teammates for the last decade, of having roomed with them on tours, and having battled them in club competitions from the age of twelve.

From a social perspective, not to mention a religious and cultural perspective, Fawad’s selection would give rise to an unprecedented team dynamic. How would David Warner’s abrasive, uncouth persona sit in Fawad’s eyes? Or the persistent media scrutiny, for that matter? Or the endless supply of sponsorships and interviews, of long tours to exotic foreign countries, and intense ping-pong tournaments on off days?

Merely thinking about how Fawad must be adapting to the bizarre and unique bubble that encloses the upper echelons of Australian cricket is intriguing.

Taking a larger look at multiculturalism in Australian sport, Fawad’s selection would mark welcome progress for cricket, which has lagged behind other sports in recent years.

Beyond Khawaja, Lisa Sthalekar and Gurinder Sandhu, it is tough to conjure up the name of more than a handful of representatives of Australian cricket that have not been white. Sure, people name Len Pascoe, Simon Katich or Michael Kasprowicz, all of whom are vaguely ethnic, and are most likely products of the heightened refugee intake in the late 1940s, but there have been disproportionately few players that represent the more recent generation of Asian migrants.

Compare this to the AFL, which is currently celebrating Indigenous Round for the whole host of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players it has on its books. Or the NRL, which has a healthy representation of Pacific Islander, Indigenous and Maori players.

And there is certainly an argument to be made that even rugby union, increasingly maligned (perhaps unfairly) as the feeder sport of the wealthy metropolitan private school students, has more multiculturalism than cricket.

Selecting Fawad (provided he is meritorious as a cricketer, of course, which he certainly is – his 8/89 in the Sheffield Shield final on a placid pitch should be reason enough to entrust him with spin duties) would show wider Australian society that multiculturalism in institutions that historically have been the most ethnically non-diverse is a trend that will only increase from here.

It would show us that selecting Usman Khawaja was not an anomaly. In fact, repeating the dose just four years later would do so much to cement multiculturalism as irrevocable and natural in Australian cricket. It is, as Noam Chomsky put it (albeit in quite a different context, one that Fawad would likely have studied in the course of his degree in international relations), ‘the threat of a good example’.

If all proceeds smoothly, some day, maybe when Harmon Sandhu and Jonte Pattison get selected for Australia, people will not even be surprised enough to write articles like this one.

In writing this, I do not wish at all to insinuate that Fawad is in some way culturally ill suited to the Australian cricket team and all the raw aggression, ethnic homogeneity and quintessential ‘Aussie-ness’ that currently typifies it. Of course, his life up until this point has been drastically different to any cricketer that has ever played for Australia. Of course he has a different religion, different life experience and a different set of values.

But what we know for certain is that cricket is the perfect game for building bridges – as cricket-loathers so eagerly point out, a single day of cricket is long enough for just about anything.

The hours of training, changing-room chatter and shared victories and losses bring people together like few other sports.

So although Fawad’s resilience might be of a different sort than Patrick Cummins (perpetual battle with injuries), or Brad Haddin (his daughter’s long struggle with illness), he has taken his place among the ultra-resilient and ultra-competitive. So perhaps the gulf is not so wide after all.

Fawad’s story is remarkable, and almost complete. It is the quintessential human interest story, played out in a cricket context. And let us not forget the cricket context. Because the only thing more satisfying than calling England out for having so many naturalised South Africans playing in their team would be to see one of our own naturalised citizens tear through them in July. Two can play at that game, England.