Khawaja memoir ‘readable, surprisingly revealing, sometimes painfully frank’ Gideon Haigh, writing for the Guardian this week, says the greatest shame of the controversy inflamed by Usman Khawaja’s memoir, Sabr, is that “99% of those opining about it will never read it”. They will experience it by quotes and summaries, magnified and distorted, elided and exaggerated, shaped by voyeurism and schadenfreude. In fact, Sabr is a readable, surprisingly revealing, sometimes painfully frank book about a unique career. Haigh says Khawaja was among the most talented batters in an Australian generation “when it was not in oversupply”, but points out he played in only 22% of the national team’s total fixtures over that period. If he developed a carapace to deal with such endless disappointment, should that surprise anyone? Sabr might mean patience or resilience in Urdu, but a strength of Khawaja’s testament is that he allows the impatience to show through. It is a cranky book because, perhaps, a d