It is an ongoing imperialist project to divorce politics from sport1 (sport by itself, one should remeber, is a capitalist and imperialist playground!), successfully transforming the pent up anger of over-exploited workers into a delirious-frenzy around a few over-paid stars, who in turn surrender their (and therefore everyone's) true freedom and quest for liberation in exchange for individual comforts offered by the capitalist's magic wand.
Irony died when Quinton de Kock refused to take cricket's already watered down version of Taking The Knee, in a match between West Indies and South Africa, the latter lead by a black man, incidentally.
The Indian cricket team has a full-time nationalist sportwashing agenda, their recent and arguably most famous icon in Virat Kohli openly promoting Puma, a company on the Palestine BDS National Committee's boycott list.
In the face of that, Usman Khwaja asking the ICC if he could sport a tiny image of dove with an olive branch on his bat and shoes, in solidarity with Palestine, admitting the two months of ongoing open-genocide caused him "immense personal beravement", does sound like a huge step ahead of the cricket bubble.
For an organization that has amassed enormous adipose tissue, it is but a request aptly and easily snubbed at its buds, a la cricket's dead-batting a good delivery.
They would rather that Muhammad Ali is a forgotten era, wound'nt they? I wonder how many today would have to ask Google why. Leave alone grow the galls and spine for enduring the whip of the imperial masters!
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Sport and imperialism today: time for an(other) anti-imperialist front, 2023, Sport in Society, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2023.2214522