The Ashes have passed Australia's Sam Konstas by - but he will be back
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Matt Roller
A year on from a startling debut against India, the opener will be playing cricket in Sydney this weekend - but in the BBL, not in the Test
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On Boxing Day 2024, Sam Konstas’ life changed forever.
Aged 19, in front of 87,242 fans at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Konstas announced himself to the world with an innings that defied logic. Opening the batting for Australia against India, with the series level at 1-1, the teenager blazed 60 off 65 balls with a series of outrageous shots rarely seen in Test cricket, let alone in the first session of a match.
He scooped and reverse-scooped, exposed his stumps to create room to hit through the off side, and swiped a slower ball over the huge square boundaries for six.
He took 18 runs off a single over from the world’s premier fast bowler, Jasprit Bumrah — the most expensive of his career — and asked for more after India took him out of the attack. “I’ll look to keep targeting him,” Konstas said in a mid-innings interview, conducted via the ‘Spidercam’ and watched incredulously by tens of millions of fans around the world. “Hopefully he might come back on.”
It was not just Konstas’ talent but his brazen attitude that seemed to confirm the arrival of a superstar.
Sam Konstas stares back at India’s Jasprit Bumrah (William West/AFP via Getty Images)
In the immediate afterglow, it felt like a dead cert that Konstas would be playing in Sydney, his hometown, in January 2026. And he will be this week, only not in Australian whites.
As his international team-mates prepare for Sunday’s fifth and final Test against England, Konstas will be playing for Sydney Thunder in the Big Bash League (BBL) on Saturday night, having been overlooked throughout this Ashes series.
Not that there has been much clamour for his inclusion.
Since that heady Boxing Day morning, Konstas has not passed 25 in nine subsequent Test innings — three against India, and six in fiendishly difficult batting conditions against the West Indies in the Caribbean after he was squeezed out by a reshuffle for a tour to Sri Lanka. Nor have his performances in domestic cricket demanded selection. He managed a single half-century in his first five matches of the Sheffield Shield season, before scoring an overdue hundred against Queensland last month.
The closest he has come to the Ashes was in a two-day tour match for the Prime Minister’s XI against England Lions most notable for a rare sighting of his part-time off-breaks. His trajectory in the last 12 months has been meteoric in the truest sense: burning very brightly, very briefly, before falling back down to earth.
Sam Konstas is playing his cricket in Sydney this weekend for the Thunder BBL franchise (Jeremy Ng/Getty Images)
It is a familiar course for a young player to follow: immediate early success as an unknown creating unrealistic expectations, then a lean patch once opponents have had the chance to develop specific plans to exploit weaknesses. Most Test batters do not peak until their late 20s or early 30s; Konstas turned 20 in October, and has still only played 28 first-class matches.
What made Konstas’ innings at the MCG all the more remarkable was that it seemed so uncharacteristic for a player who had only made his professional T20 debut nine days previously. “I’d never seen him bat like that,” Trent Copeland, the three-cap Australia seamer turned broadcaster, tells The Athletic.
Copeland first encountered Konstas at St George’s Cricket Club in Sydney, playing with his brothers on the grass banks of Hurstville Oval. “They’d be hitting balls for hours on end, and high-fiving us as we walked off the field at drinks… He lives and breathes cricket. He wants to be around cricket. He wants to score runs. He’s like Steve Smith: he wants to bat non-stop.”
When Copeland was appointed general manager at Sydney Thunder in early 2024, one of his first recruitment decisions was to offer an 18-year-old Konstas a fresh two-year contract after his Australia Under-19s commitments ruled him out of the 2023-24 BBL.
“He’d hardly played a white-ball game,” Copeland recalls. “The talk about him was, ‘Man, this guy has scored another hundred’. Age-group, second XI, Under-19s carnival: he was breaking records for runs scored, then came into Shield cricket and scored two hundreds in one game against South Australia. His development was firmly in the realm of: red-ball game on track, and white-ball expansion and 360-degree shots were the work-on.”
Sam Konstas unfurls the ramp shot on Test debut at the MCG (William West/AFP via Getty Images)
Whether still in T20 mode after playing for the Thunder, or simply riding high on the adrenaline of the occasion, Konstas’ debut innings belied his reputation as a patient young player. He has grappled with his tempo ever since.
He was panned for over-aggression after losing his leg stump while attempting to slog-sweep Scott Boland seven balls into a Sheffield Shield innings, but found himself stuck and struggling to score against West Indies in July.
“I feel for Sammy,” George Bailey, Australia’s selector, said before the Ashes. “If he farts, it’s a headline.
Sam Konstas struggled badly in a low-scoring series in West Indies last year (Randy Brooks/AFP via Getty Images)
Konstas’ debut turned him into an overnight celebrity. He is hard to miss if you flick on Australian TV: he features prominently in a series of adverts for Westpac, the bank that sponsors Australia’s shirts, and recently signed up as an ambassador for the free-to-air network Channel Seven.
“We had a team meal the other night in Canberra, and everyone wants to come up and have a photo with him,” Sam Billings, his Sydney Thunder team-mate, tells The Athletic. “It’s unbelievable. It’s next-level.”
Konstas is a cricketing Emma Raducanu who has brands queuing up to align themselves with him.
In June, shortly after he was left out of Australia’s team for the World Test Championship final, he was hailed as the “Future of Cricket” on the front page of The Australian’s weekend magazine as part of a glossy photoshoot with Phoebe Litchfield.
“The great thing about him is that he hasn’t changed at all,” says Billings, who first played with Konstas shortly before his Test debut. “He’s so polite, so respectful, and just a really good kid — and he is still a kid, at 20.
“I think (Jacob) Bethell might go through something similar. All young players go through it. Everyone wants everything tomorrow, but things take time and people are allowed to develop. He’s managed the pluses and minuses in the last year and maintained the same personality.”
Konstas relies heavily on two coaches: Tahmid Islam, a Bangladesh batting coach with whom he has worked since he was a schoolboy, and Shane Watson, the former Australia all-rounder who acts as his mentor.
“He’s got some really good people around him. And, if I’m being honest, some young players have got some really bad people around them,” Billings says. “They are keeping his feet on the ground, telling him to work hard and that everything will work itself out — which we all hope is exactly what happens.”
Sam Konstas has had to deal with overnight celebrity (Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
Andrew McDonald, Australia’s coach, described Konstas’ recent struggles as “a little dip” on Monday. “He was 19 at the time, and he changed the series here 12 months ago,” said McDonald, speaking at the MCG after his team’s four-wicket loss in the fourth Ashes Test. “We think there’s a lot of cricket ahead of him.
“Sometimes, the expectations on young players are a little unfair. We pump them up and we expect them to maintain performance, and we know that performance isn’t linear and he’s going to have his ups and downs. He’s going to have more of those through his career, but he’s been able to bounce back: he found some Shield runs, he’s playing T20 cricket, he spreads across all three formats.
“I think we just need to be a little kinder to the challenges that (players) do face in bouncing in and out of formats.”
Sam Konstas emerges into the sunlight at the MCG (Martin Keep/AFP via Getty Images)
After the end of the Ashes next week, Australia will not play another Test until August — an unusually long break in their schedule, which should play in Konstas’ favour. Jake Weatherald is yet to nail down his spot, Usman Khawaja looks unlikely to play again at 39, and Travis Head has described his recent promotion to open the batting as being specifically “for the series” rather than committing to the role on a long-term basis.
The team also needs to regenerate. Australia have relied on their veterans in this series, using only two players — Cameron Green (26) and Jhye Richardson (29), neither of whom has made much impact — under the age of 30. They are mindful of “future-proofing” the side as senior players approach retirement.
Once the BBL finishes in January, Konstas will have at least four more Shield matches for New South Wales in which to stake a claim for inclusion, and hopes to play in England’s County Championship for the first time after the Australian season comes to an end. It is clear that he will be back playing international cricket at some stage: the only question is when.
“You need to score runs — that is your currency, no matter how talented you are — but I’m almost certain that he (Konstas) will be back playing Test cricket (soon),” Copeland predicts. “I also think he’s really set up fantastically well to play all three formats. His foundations are very good when they’re at their best, his defence is good and his temperament is excellent. When he starts figuring out the method, it’s going to be good in all formats.”
Konstas proved last Boxing Day that his best is very good. In 2026, he must close the gap between his best and the rest.
