Witty, bold, vulnerable and rogue: A bumper commentary career awaits Usman Khawaja

On New Year's Day in 2021, during a rain-affected Big Bash League game involving Usman Khawaja, the batting stalwart gave an interview that had him being touted as a commentary hit in the making.

In recent days, Khawaja's candid "piece of shit" description of the Perth Stadium pitch, though a source of anger for Cricket Australia, was the latest of many signs a bumper venture into the commentary world lay ahead.

Khawaja will take up a full-time position as a Fox Cricket commentator after he calls time on his storied playing career, joining childhood mate and former Test opening partner David Warner in the box.

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Khawaja was 34 and in the international cricket wilderness when he was first touted as a commentator in the making.

He hadn't played for Australia in more than a year, since a string of low scores on the 2019 Ashes tour of the UK culminated in his most recent Test axing.

Popular podcaster and TV host Mark Howard, in need of engaging content as rain drenched the Gold Coast, went probing for what made Khawaja tick, both during his exile from the national set-up and otherwise.

"Probably the most important thing for me is gratitude — making sure I'm really grateful for all the blessings I have," Khawaja, playing for Sydney Thunder at the time, said at one point in the interview.

"We live in a beautiful country in Australia, every day we're blessed, I've got a beautiful wife, I've got a beautiful family, I've got a beautiful child now.

"There's a lot of things in life I can be grateful for — even just the food on the table.

"I love a coffee," Khawaja added, smiling.

"So I'm grateful I can go out and get a coffee every day, because there's plenty of people out there who can't even do that."

In a lengthy chat covering everything from motivation to leisure, media scrutiny to lessons learned, and family to faith, the then Thunder skipper offered one fascinating answer after another.

"We're having a nice, extended chat with Usman Khawaja," Howard said midway through, "who I feel might be with us in a commentary box very soon."

Khawaja was warm and articulate in that chat on Fox Cricket.

When he clapped back at Ian Chappell later that year in response to criticism about his batting, remarking that the former Australian Test captain was "not even the best player in his family", he showed humour and wit.

So, too, during the speech he delivered after taking out the Shane Warne Men's Test Player of the Year award in 2023, when Khawaja stood on stage wearing a pink velour suit jacket and rattled off gag after gag.

And in his rebuttal to Queensland head of cricket Joe Dawes amid the furore caused by his appearance at the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix this year, at the same time that the Bulls were playing their final regular-season game of the Sheffield Shield season.

Khawaja, who had been accused by Dawes of not informing Queensland Cricket of a hamstring injury, said he was not expecting an apology.

"He's best mates with Peter Dutton, and I've never seen Dutton given an apology in 20 years," Khawaja quipped.

Of course, Khawaja also spoke with boldness and vulnerability in his rebuttal, detailing with intricate detail in an emotional press conference his body of evidence.

It was a throwback to the time he stood up to Justin Langer ahead of a 2018 Test against Pakistan in the UAE, taking umbrage at the then national coach's insistence that batters rotate between the nets after each dismissal.

Khawaja, now 38, was particularly vulnerable in a chat with Fox Cricket ahead of the ongoing summer.

"I think God gave me Rach [his wife] to help me through this journey. Without Rach I'd probably be really struggling, because I struggle to open up," Khawaja said.

"I'm a '90s kid. My dad didn't talk about emotions, we didn't talk about emotions; we just dealt with it and got on with it.

"The only one I really talk to is Rach about it ... She's been my rock the whole way through."

Which takes us back to that assessment of the Perth pitch.

The comments, delivered at a lunch hosted by the Usman Khawaja Foundation, which provides funding and education opportunities for refugees and struggling remote families, were certainly rogue.

And for exactly that reason they were another sign Khawaja is sure to be box-office in the Fox commentary box.