Steven Smith wants to play until the 2028 Olympics while at the same time highlighting his T20 cricket ambitions.
Steven Smith has set his sights on the 2028 Olympics, declaring he wants to prolong his short-form career and return to Australia’s T20 team for the Los Angeles Games.
Smith’s unbroken 121 from 64 balls on Saturday helped the Sydney Sixers defeat the Perth Scorchers in the BBL, and it was one of his best T20 innings to date.
In his knock, Australia’s previous T20 skipper smashed seven sixes, influencing the Scorchers’ bowling and using creativity to reach the short boundary.
In recent years, Smith is a fading force from T20 cricket. He was absent in Australia’s squad for the T20 World Cup last year. The only franchise cricket he played for last year was for Washington in the USA’s Major League Cricket, and he has also been passed over in the last four IPL auctions.
However, Smith’s BBL performance has consistently demonstrated that he is one of the nation’s top T20 openers, as he has amassed three hundreds in his previous seven games. Smith had only played 32 games compared to McDermott’s 100, but the three tonnes put him on par with McDermott for the most in tournament history.
He has the greatest average of any local player at 45.88, and he has the sixth-best strike rate of any player at 146.3.
Smith, however, says he is looking forward to wearing Australian colours again and does not want to be a domestic player in the shortest format.
“I’d like to play the Olympics, I reckon that would be cool,” Smith said. “We’ll see how far I go in terms of long-form cricket. But I am going to play short-form cricket for a while I think when I do finish. You never know. There are a lot of good young kids who are smacking the ball out of the park.”
Smith will be 39 when cricket makes its Olympic comeback in 2028, the first time the sport has been included since 1900, when only France and Great Britain participated.
He has not yet disclosed his plans to retire from red-ball cricket, but he has made it clear that he wants to continue playing Twenty20 cricket for a long time.
Smith barely had any T20 preparation going into Saturday’s match; his only hit against the white ball since the India Test series came 15 minutes before the BBL match.
“I find the more I play back-to-back games you get in sync with the game,” Smith said. “Even [Saturday] I don’t think I played my first 10 balls really well. I was probably going a bit too hard for how the wicket was playing.
“But if I am playing T20s regularly, I probably come out with a slightly different mindset at the start, give myself a bit more time. It’s just the gears and going up and down in the gears throughout the innings [that change for T20s]. And just playing the percentages.”