Usman Khawaja, the former Australia batsman has called for Steve Smith to take back the captaincy of the Test side after Tim Paine\u2019s tenure is over. Smith has led the team for nearly three years, and was banned from the captaincy for two years in the wake of the Newlands ball tampering scandal in 2018.<\/p>\n
Khawaja told reporters in Brisbane on Friday, \u201cIf Steve Smith wants to captain Australia, I think he should Captain Australia.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is our number one batsman, he\u2019s done it before, he has paid for his mistakes, there is no reason why he shouldn\u2019t be in the line for the captaincy if wants to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Paine succeeded as captain and led Australia to their Ashes victory in England in 2019.<\/p>\n
Paine\u2019s captaincy was criticized during the Test series against India and Australia 2-1 loss against injury-ravaged tourists sparked calls for the 36-year-old to resign the captaincy and focus on his wicketkeeping.<\/p>\n
Smith recently won a third Allan Border Medal as the country\u2019s top male cricketer, reporters told last month the captaincy was \u201cnot on his radar\u201d and the decision was out of his hands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Usman Khawaja, the former Australia batsman has called for Steve Smith to take back the captaincy of the Test side\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":25383,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1400,349,466,1251],"class_list":["post-2286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cricket","tag-australia-cricket","tag-steve-smith","tag-tim-paine","tag-usman-khawaja"],"reading_time":"1 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/sports\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}