Steve Smith Reflects on Ashes Future and Olympic Aspirations
Steve Smith has spent a decade chasing greatness in whites. Now he’s openly wondering if he’ll still be wearing them when Australia next walks out for an Ashes Test in England.
At 37, with an average of 56.00 from 125 Tests and a place among the game’s modern giants, Smith should be marching towards one last crack at history. Instead, he’s talking about the end.
Ashes dream on the clock
Smith sits fourth on Australia’s all-time Test runs list, just eight runs shy of Steve Waugh and third place. Waugh needed 168 matches to pile up his tally; Smith has almost caught him in 43 fewer.
Yet that looming milestone barely registers in his own assessment of what comes next.
Speaking to the UK Telegraph, the former captain admitted that next year’s Ashes in England is no longer a certainty for him.
“I don’t even know if I’ll be there yet,” he said. “I’m kind of a series-by-series proposition, as I’ve been for a while, and that’s still a fair way away for me right now.”
For a player who has dominated England’s bowlers for years, the one missing line on his resume still stings: he has never won a Test series in England. It’s a prize that has driven several of Australia’s veterans to keep going. Smith, though, is refusing to promise he’ll hang around purely for that shot.
“So, yeah, I’d love to win (a series) there or to have won one there, but you wait and see if that comes to fruition,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of fun. I’m still enjoying it, so I don’t have an end date, we’ll wait and see. But it’s been a good ride.”
No grand farewell tour. No circled date on the calendar. Just a champion leaving the door half-open and the cricket world guessing.
Turning towards T20 – and LA 2028
While some of his contemporaries, like Mitchell Starc, are doubling down on Test cricket, Smith is quietly shifting his gaze to the shortest format.
Not for franchise millions, he insists. For the Olympics.
Cricket’s return to the Games at Los Angeles 2028 has become a new north star.
“Right now probably it’s just the Olympics, to try to be a part of that,” Smith said when asked about his remaining goals.
He will be 39 by then, hardly a guaranteed starter in what will likely be a fiercely contested Australian T20 squad. That uncertainty hasn’t stopped him from throwing himself into the format.
Smith is currently in Dublin, turning out for Amsterdam Flames in the European T20 Premier League, hunting overs and opportunities in a new corner of the cricketing map.
“One of the reasons why I wanted to play with Amsterdam here was just to continue playing as much T20 cricket as I can,” he explained. He spoke of wanting to share a dressing room with local and associate players, to pass on knowledge as much as runs. “It’s been really good.”
The image is a striking one: one of the finest Test batters of his era, grinding away in a fledgling T20 league, sharpening his game for a tournament still four years away.
Return to South Africa
Before any decision on England, before the Olympic dream takes clearer shape, there is a more immediate and emotionally charged assignment.
Next month, Smith will pull on the Baggy Green again for a Test series in South Africa.
It will be Australia’s first Test tour there since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal in Cape Town, the episode that cost Smith the captaincy and earned him, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft lengthy bans.
For Smith, it is a return to the scene of the lowest point of his career, this time as a senior statesman rather than a lightning rod. The numbers say he is still Australia’s best Test batter. The calendar says his time at the top is finite.
He has no end date. No guarantees. Just another series, then another decision.
If the Ashes in England does come too late for him, the game will move on. But it will do so knowing that one of its great modern craftsmen chose his own timing, his own path — and perhaps, one last stage under the Olympic lights.
