Australian opener Usman Khawaja said on Saturday that he will continue playing Test cricket if three crucial boxes are ticked.
The 36-year-old’s excellent performance in the recent 2-2 series draw in England assured Australia’s retention of the urn. He led both teams’ Ashes batting averages. At Cricket Australia’s Play Cricket Week event in Brisbane, Khawaja was asked if the home Ashes series of 2025-26 was still on his radar.
“In 2025… one series at a time I go with, You can get ahead of yourself and look to that time (in 2025) and think, ‘I can probably get there’, but I don’t want to (do that)” Khawaja said as quoted by ESPNcricinfo.
“I like playing one summer at a time and seeing how the body is going, how the mind is going and whether I am enjoying it. It is those three things. I am ticking those three boxes at the moment so I will keep playing.”
Khawaja reflected back on the remarkable Ashes 2023 series and said that many people come to him saying how good the series was.
“I have had so many people come up to me and tell me how good the Test series was. So for cricket…cricket definitely won, I’ve had more than 50 people tell me the last couple of weeks how much sleep they lost watching the Ashes,” he added.
“We would have loved to have won but we have now retained [or won] four Ashes series in a row…2019 and 2023 in England. The last time England won in Australia was 2010-11, when I debuted.
“So we’ve been dominating Ashes cricket for a long time and that is the bigger picture. England is going to have to come back here and beat us and do something they haven’t done for a very long time.”
In the upcoming months, Australia will play West Indies and Pakistan. Khawaja is looking forward to opening alongside David Warner in what will be his good friend’s final summer of Test cricket. No matter who replaced Warner in tests, he claimed that the opening ranks had a promising future.
