Steve Smith does not know if he will be at the 2027 Ashes, and India comes first
Australia’s 37-year-old says he is a series-by-series proposition and cannot commit to touring England next year. Three Tests in South Africa, four against New Zealand and five in India come first.
Sep 14, 2026
Steve Smith has stopped planning his Test career more than one series ahead. Speaking at Malahide on Monday, the 37-year-old told The Telegraph he could not say whether he will be in Australia’s squad when the Ashes are played in England next year.
“I don’t even know if I’ll be there yet,” Smith 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. So, yeah, I’d love to win one there or to have won one there, but you wait and see if that comes to fruition.”
That is not a retirement announcement. It is something more awkward for Australia’s selectors: a batter of Smith’s standing declining to commit past the next assignment, at a point when the next assignments arrive in a heap.
What sits between Smith and Trent Bridge
Quite a lot. Australia go to South Africa next month for three Tests, opening at Kingsmead in Durban on October 9 before St George’s Park in Gqeberha on October 18 and Newlands on October 27. It is their first Test tour of the country since the ball-tampering trip of 2018, and Newlands is where that unravelled.
New Zealand then arrive for four Tests squeezed into just over a month of the Australian summer: Perth from December 9, Adelaide from December 17, the Boxing Day Test at the MCG and the New Year Test in Sydney.
Then India. Australia tour for five Tests in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, starting shortly after that Sydney Test in January 2027. Only once all of that is behind them does the Ashes begin, at Trent Bridge on June 18.
Read Smith’s answer literally and the order matters. South Africa, New Zealand and India all have to be got through before England is a question he is willing to entertain. Cricket Australia’s calendar has Pat Cummins’ side playing 21 Tests between August and July.
Which puts a particular weight on the Indian leg. A five-Test series in India, in the middle of a year like that, at 37, is exactly the kind of assignment that ends careers rather than extends them. Indian crowds may want to treat it accordingly.
The Olympics are the goal, not England
Asked what he is actually chasing now, Smith pointed somewhere else.
“Right now probably it’s just the Olympics (as a goal) to try to be a part of that,” he said.
He means Los Angeles in 2028, where cricket returns to the Games as a six-team T20 competition for men and women. An Australian who built his reputation on the longest format naming a T20 tournament two years out as his motivation, while a tour of England next summer gets a shrug, tells you where the pull is now.
He is playing T20 cricket in Ireland at the moment, for the Amsterdam Flames in the inaugural European T20 Premier League, which is where Monday’s conversation happened. Ajinkya Rahane and Mitchell Marsh are in the same dressing room.
“I’ve achieved a lot in the game,” Smith said. “It’s been a great ride for the last 15 years or thereabouts.”
Australia would much rather he stayed
The numbers still argue his case. Smith has played 125 Tests and scored 37 centuries, and he is ranked the second-best Test batter in the world, behind England’s Harry Brook. Sides do not casually replace a top-order batter in that bracket, and Australia’s is not a young team.
There is also the small matter of what he says he wants. Australia have not won an Ashes series in England since 2001. Smith saying he would love to win one there, in the same breath as saying he does not know if he will be there, is the closest thing to an admission that the body is now making these decisions and not the ambition.
Nobody in the Australian set-up will push him for an answer yet. But the questions will keep coming, and the ones asked in January will come from Indian press boxes.