Steve Smith Reflects on Future in Cricket and Olympics Goals

Steve Smith has spent a decade bending Test cricket to his will. Now he’s openly wondering whether he’ll even be around for the next Ashes.

At 37, the numbers still look absurd. An average of 56.00 across 125 Tests. Fourth on Australia’s all-time run-scorers list. Eight runs shy of Steve Waugh, who needed 168 matches to get where Smith has arrived in 125. On paper, he’s still Australia’s premier Test batter. On the field, he remains the anchor around which the red-ball side is built.

Yet the man himself is no longer talking like a player locked in for one more tilt at England.

“I don’t even know if I’ll be there yet,” he told the UK Telegraph when asked about next year’s Ashes in England.

That single line will jolt Australian fans. Smith has never won a Test series in England, the one glaring gap in a glittering career and a powerful motivator for several of Australia’s senior players. The idea that he might walk away before that final crack at history feels almost unthinkable. But he sounds increasingly comfortable living in the short term.

“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,” he said. “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.

“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.”

Those are not the words of a player mapping out a farewell tour. They’re the reflections of a veteran who knows he owes nothing to the game, and owes himself the right to choose the moment.

Turning towards T20 – and the Olympics

While some of his contemporaries are doubling down on Test cricket, Smith is edging in a different direction.

Mitchell Starc has spoken about prioritising the red-ball format. Plenty of others are doing the opposite, chasing the growing Twenty20 circuit and the financial muscle that comes with it. Smith insists money isn’t the driving force, but he’s clear his cricketing gaze has shifted.

Right now, his horizon is not Lord’s or The Oval. It’s Los Angeles.

“Right now probably it’s just the Olympics, to try to be a part of that,” he said of his remaining goals.

Cricket’s return to the Olympic programme for the 2028 Games has lit a fresh fire for a generation of T20 specialists and veterans alike. Smith will be 39 by then. There is no guarantee he will still be in Australia’s best T20 XI. He knows that, which is why he is stacking short-form experience wherever he can.

He is currently in Dublin, turning out for Amsterdam Flames in the European T20 Premier League. It’s an unusual sight: one of the modern greats of Test batting grinding away in a fledgling franchise competition, far from the glare of the Big Bash or the IPL, but very much by design.

“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.

“I was keen immediately to come and play in a new market and, hopefully, share some experiences with the local players and associate players: share a dressing room with them and try to impart some of my knowledge on to them. It’s been really good.”

This is Smith as mentor and missionary as much as marquee name, using his status to lift standards in a developing league while sharpening his own white-ball game. The shift in emphasis is obvious: Test cricket is no longer the only, or even primary, pillar of his planning.

unfinished business, old scars

For all the talk of T20 and the Olympics, Smith’s next assignment in Australian colours brings him back to a place that changed his life.

Next month, he will return to South Africa with the Test team. It will be Australia’s first Test tour there since the 2018 ball-tampering scandal in Cape Town, the crisis that cost Smith the captaincy and saw him, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft banned.

The last time he walked off a Test ground in South Africa, his career stood on a knife edge. Now he returns as a senior statesman, a rehabilitated figure, and still the most reliable bat in the order.

That backdrop alone would make the series compelling. Layer in the uncertainty around his long-term Test future and it becomes something else entirely.

Smith insists he is still enjoying the game. He is still scoring runs. He is still, by any objective measure, indispensable. But he has also earned the right to think beyond tradition, beyond the Ashes, beyond the usual markers that define an Australian great.

If he does decide to step away from Tests before that next trip to England, his record will stand. The question is whether a player so driven by challenge can truly walk off without one last swing at the urn on English soil – or whether the lure of an Olympic gold medal, in a format that now shapes his weeks and months, proves the final chapter he wants instead.