made at lunch for his foundation, external<\/a>, Khawaja asked: “19 wickets on the first day, about 20 people got hit \u2013 that’s a great wicket, that seems real fair?<\/p>\n“The same thing happened last year, that day one wicket. Steve Smith is by far the best cricketer I’ve played with. He’s missing the middle of his bat by a long way, and he does not miss the middle of the bat. <\/p>\n
“You can’t really predict up and down; your hands can’t catch up.”<\/p>\n
Khawaja has found his position in the Australia side under threat after Travis Head hammered a match-winning century from the top of the order in the first Test.<\/p>\n
The 38-year-old suffered back spasms meaning he could not open in the first innings after spending time off the field.<\/p>\n
He came in at four and made two before edging Brydon Carse behind and did not bat in the second innings after Australia opted to promote Head to open.<\/p>\n
If Khawaja were to be dropped from the XI, Australia would either select in-form batter Josh Inglis or all-rounder Beau Webster in his place, with Head opening the batting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia batter Usman Khawaja has been highly critical of the decision to award the pitch for the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":288672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-288671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}