Auqib Nabi has 104 Ranji wickets in two seasons, and it took a Bumrah injury to get him picked
Two Ranji seasons, 104 wickets and a maiden title for Jammu and Kashmir were not enough to get Auqib Nabi into an India squad. A knee injury to Jasprit Bumrah was.
Aug 4, 2026
India’s squad was due to fly to Sri Lanka on Tuesday with a 29-year-old seamer in it who has spent two years as the most productive red-ball bowler in the country. Auqib Nabi was named on Monday as Jasprit Bumrah’s replacement for the two Tests, and if he plays in Galle on 15 August he will be the first cricketer from Jammu and Kashmir to appear in a Test match.
Two seasons that should have made this obvious
Nabi took 60 wickets in the 2025-26 Ranji Trophy, finishing as the season’s leading wicket-taker. That is the seventh-highest tally by any bowler in a Ranji edition and the third-highest by a fast bowler, behind Jaydev Unadkat’s 67 in 2019-20 and Dodda Ganesh’s 62 in 1998-99. He was the first J&K bowler to take 50 in a season and the first to top the charts, beating his own previous best of 44 the year before.
Stack the two seasons together and the number is 104 Ranji wickets. Only four bowlers in the tournament’s history have taken more across successive seasons, and only one of those is a seamer, Unadkat again, with 106 in 2018-19 and 2019-20. Nabi’s 13 five-wicket hauls in 18 matches over that stretch trail only Ashutosh Aman’s 14.
The 2025-26 first-class season brought him 66 wickets at 13.25 and eight five-fors, which equals the most by any pacer in a first-class season in India. The other two men on that list, Maurice Tate and Ron Oxenham, did it in 1926-27 and 1935-36. Across every senior domestic competition he finished the season with 95 wickets, second only to Unadkat’s 105 in 2019-20.
All of it landed on a team that had never finished in the top four of anything. J&K won the Ranji Trophy for the first time in 2025-26, in their 67th year of trying and at their first appearance in a final, beating Karnataka on first-innings lead at Hubballi in February. Nabi took 5 for 54 in that first innings, his seventh five-for of the season. Delhi Capitals had paid Rs 8.40 crore for him at the IPL auction in Abu Dhabi two months earlier, when he was still uncapped.
A seam attack picked from what is left
Bumrah was ruled out on Monday with a left knee problem he picked up in Cardiff during the second ODI against England, which is itself a continuation of what has been bothering him since the T20 World Cup. India had already lost Harshit Rana to a hamstring injury and Nitish Kumar Reddy to a quadriceps problem. Akash Deep is partway through a long layoff with stress reactions in his back. Washington Sundar is out of the first Test, also with a hamstring.
What remains is Mohammed Siraj, Prasidh Krishna, Gurnoor Brar and Nabi. For a two-Test tour of Sri Lanka that is probably enough, because Galle will hand most of the work to Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav and Manav Suthar. It does mean the uncapped seamer is one injury away from the XI rather than three.
Nabi is not a new discovery who got lucky. He was in the India A squad that toured Sri Lanka recently and took six wickets in two first-class matches, so the selectors have watched him bowl on these surfaces within the last few weeks. The three-day warm-up in Colombo from 7 August gives him another look.
What a first Test cap would mean
Parvez Rasool became the first J&K cricketer to play for India when he was picked for an ODI against Bangladesh in June 2014. He got that match, one T20I against England in January 2017, in which he dismissed Eoin Morgan, and nothing else. He retired last year without a Test cap. That is the reference point Nabi is measured against, which tells you how far outside the system the state has sat for most of its history.
Nabi is 29, which by the standards of Indian fast bowling is late rather than young, and he has arrived through the most unglamorous route available: bowling long spells in Ranji cricket, year after year, until the numbers became impossible to file away. Whether he gets a cap in Galle or Colombo will come down to conditions and how many seamers India want. Either way, there is a J&K seamer in an India Test squad, which has not been true before.