Khawaja says an MCC member called him a racial slur in the Lord’s Long Room during the 2023 Ashes

Usman Khawaja has alleged that he was racially abused in the Long Room at Lord’s during the 2023 Ashes. In his autobiography, Sabr, published on Tuesday, he writes that someone among the MCC members told him to “shut up, you P**i” as Australia walked off for lunch on the final day of the second Test.

It came in the hours after Jonny Bairstow’s stumping. Alex Carey had thrown down the stumps underarm when Bairstow wandered out of his crease thinking the ball was dead, and the Lord’s crowd booed Australia for the rest of the day. The abuse followed the players into the pavilion.

What Khawaja says happened

The cameras caught part of it at the time. Sky Sports footage showed Khawaja stopping to confront one member, then stopping again to point out another to the stewards before heading up the stairs to the away dressing room.

The book fills in what the cameras could not hear. Khawaja writes that one man shouted right into his ear from the other side of the rope, and that he told him not to do it again. As he walked on, he heard the slur. “I lost it,” he wrote.

He is careful about who said it. Khawaja writes that he does not know exactly who it was, and that he confronted the first man he saw because he assumed it had come from him. He also says another member tried to trip him and David Warner.

What MCC did

MCC suspended three members straight after the Test. After an investigation it expelled one of them and banned the other two, for four and a half years and two and a half years. Asked about Khawaja’s claim this week, the club declined to comment, though it pointed to how seriously it had treated the matter and how heavy those punishments were.

Khawaja’s public line in 2023 was far milder. He called the members’ behaviour “really disappointing” and “pretty disrespectful”, and did not go into detail.

A book that keeps landing punches

Australia won that Lord’s Test by 43 runs, after Ben Stokes made 155 in the chase. Until now, though, the fallout from Sabr has been about Cape Town. Khawaja’s claim that the whole 2018 dressing room shared responsibility for the sandpaper scandal, and that sandpaper was used in Port Elizabeth too, has dominated Australian cricket for days. Cricket Australia’s chief executive Todd Greenberg says there is no “compelling reason” to reopen the investigation, and Mitchell Starc has denied knowing sandpaper was taken onto the field.

I find the Lord’s chapter harder to wave away. The sandpaper claims are one man’s memory set against an official inquiry and the accounts of the other players. At Lord’s there is footage of Khawaja confronting members, and MCC punished three of them at the time. What is new is the word itself, and Khawaja, who was born in Islamabad, is the only person who can say what he heard.

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