Melbourne : Australian selection chair George Bailey indicated that all-rounder Mitchell Marsh, currently the T20I captain, still has an "incredibly important role" to play in white-ball cricket and his red-ball career is also not over as well.
The Aussies named a 23-player list that will receive national contracts for the 2025/26 season on Tuesday, which also witnessed Marsh getting a central contract. The 33-year-old has dealt with plenty of injury issues recently, which hampered his ability to bowl and he last played for Australia back in December last year during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, in which he was below par with both bat and ball, taking just three wickets and scoring just 73 runs.
Currently, he is playing for Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) in the Indian Premier League (IPL) as a specialist batter and has scored 124 runs in two innings averaging 62 with two fifties, striking at over 185.
"I still think he has got an incredibly important role to play," Bailey said of Marsh, as quoted by ICC.
"He has had some injury issues, and towards the back end of the summer, he was battling with his back a little bit. It is an ongoing conversation as to where bowling may or may not fit into his international cricket going forward. At the moment, in the IPL, he is available only as a batter."
"He is still the captain of our T20 team and still think he can play an incredibly important role in setting that team up and hopefully leading that team to some success in the T20 World Cup. I think he has got plenty of one-day cricket left in him as well, so I still think he is a really valuable member of the white-ball sides," Bailey added.
And while Marsh got dropped from Australia's Test side last summer following a run of poor scores with the bat, Bailey has not given up on the hard-hitter making a return to the red-ball side and thinks the Ashes series against England at the end of the year could suit.
"I do not necessarily think that his red ball career is over as well," Bailey noted. "I do not think he was scoring the runs that he would have wanted, or we would have wanted, when we left him out of the Test side. But I still think there is an incredibly exciting skill-set there with the bat, the way he can rip a game open."
"If you look ahead to a team like England, and the way they play their cricket and the way they seem to be framing up their team, I think he has got a skill-set there that could be helpful," he concluded.
Cricket Australia men's contract list 2025-26: Xavier Bartlett, Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Pat Cummins, Nathan Ellis, Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Sam Konstas, Matthew Kuhnemann, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitchell Marsh, Glenn Maxwell, Lance Morris, Jhye Richardson, Matt Short, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Beau Webster, Adam Zampa.