Robbie Farah reveals delight at Usman Khawaja’s success after Alice Springs meeting

AS a cricketer at the crossroads, two years after his first Test, Usman Khawaja sat in an Alice Springs hotel lobby with NRL star Robbie Farah.

Two years since he’d last played a Test and with five months of rehabilitation still to go on his ruptured knee, Khawaja sat in an Alice Springs hotel lobby with NRL star Robbie Farah, as a cricketer at the crossroads.

Farah, in the red centre for a Wests Tigers trial match and Khawaja there to mentor at an indigenous cricket carnival, spoke in the most unlikely location about the physical and mental torment of serious injury.

A coffee with a fellow athlete can be like a session with a shrink for a professional sportsman – so unique is the shared nature of their experiences – and a year ago to the day since his open chat with Farah, Khawaja hasn’t looked back, as his signature century in Wellington would attest to.

Farah came back from his own anterior cruciate ligament injury early in his career and can appreciate how extraordinary it’s that in the space of 12 months Khawaja has gone from a position of sheer helplessness to now standing at the summit of his sport as the most in-form batsman in the world.

“I’m mates with Brad Haddin and Dan Smith and a few of the cricket boys so I’d met him a few times before. He was recovering from a knee reconstruction and obviously I’d been through a knee reconstruction when I was a lot younger, so we just kind of spoke about the recovery and how he was doing and how tough it was,” Farah told News Corp.

“When athletes have similar injuries you’re always comparing and sharing experiences.

“There’s always uncertainty with any injury – you doubt yourself whether you’re going to come back as strong or as good.

“It’s one thing to come back, but to come back so well and be in the form he’s in now is a credit to himself and it’s great to watch.

“I sit back and watch and the way he’s going he’s the best batsman in the world at the moment.”

When Khawaja tore his ACL trying to catch a ball at a Sydney Thunder training session in late 2014 – he went from the cusp of an international recall to the bottom of the queue.

The unusualness of the injury for a cricketer wouldn’t have helped his state of mind, and the knee blow out did nothing for his hamstrings either – as Khawaja tore both within a couple of months of returning to the field in the second half of last year.

Today the Wests Tigers club were glued to the screen as western suburbs product Khawaja smashed the best and most important century of his career – a testament to hard work.

“All us boys at the Tigers, I know Woodsy (Aaron Woods) is a massive cricket fan too and we’ve been texting each other the whole time going ‘how good’s Uzzie going’. It’s great to see,” said Farah.

“You just have to take confidence from the work you’ve put in from rehab and trust you’ve done everything possible to get yourself back and you can see that now with the way he’s playing.”