Srinagar gets its biggest match since 1986, and the bowler who won J&K the Ranji Trophy will not be there

On 1 October the Irani Cup goes to Srinagar. Jammu and Kashmir, Ranji Trophy champions for the first time in their history, host a Rest of India side captained by Rishabh Pant at the Sher-i-Kashmir Stadium, and the city gets its biggest week of cricket since 1986.

That date is not a flourish. The ground has staged exactly two international matches: an ODI against West Indies on 13 October 1983, and another against Australia on 9 September 1986. Nothing of that size has been played in the valley since.

Sixty-seven years, then a title

J&K earned the fixture the hard way. They had never reached a Ranji Trophy final in 67 years of entering the competition. In February they not only reached one, they took it apart, building a 291-run first-innings lead over eight-time champions Karnataka at Hubballi and winning the title on that lead on 28 February.

Paras Dogra, 41 years old and captaining a side nobody had picked, led them there. Abdul Samad was one of the batters who carried them. And a fast bowler from Baramulla took the season apart.

The man who should headline this week

Auqib Nabi finished the Ranji Trophy with 60 wickets, the most by anyone in the 2025-26 season and the first time a J&K bowler has topped that list. He was Player of the Series. His tally is the seventh-highest by any bowler in a single edition of the Ranji Trophy 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 took eight five-wicket hauls along the way, the equal-most by a pacer in a first-class season in India.

He will not be at the Sher-i-Kashmir Stadium on 1 October. Nabi was handed a maiden India ODI call-up on 16 September for the West Indies series, which runs 27 September, 30 September and 3 October, straight through the Irani Cup. The reward for the best season a J&K bowler has ever had is a place in an India squad that keeps him away from the home ground on the biggest week it has had in four decades.

Nobody at the JKCA will be complaining. It is still a strange piece of scheduling to look at.

A ground that spent 18 years off the map

The Sher-i-Kashmir Stadium holds about 5,000 people, which puts it closer to a county ground than to the venues that host India’s home internationals. It was occupied by the Central Reserve Police Force for 18 years during the insurgency, and first-class cricket only resumed there in 2009. The National Cricket Academy has been building an indoor complex on the site.

Five thousand seats will not meet demand for this one. That is a decent problem for a union territory whose senior team played its home Ranji cricket in Jammu for long stretches of the last three decades.

What Pant brings north

The BCCI named the Rest of India squad on 16 September. Pant captains and keeps wicket, with Sarfaraz Khan as his deputy: Sanat Sangwan, Shikhar Mohan, Sudip Gharami, Smaran Ravichandran, Manav Suthar, Saransh Jain, Mukesh Kumar, Mukesh Choudhary, Aryan Juyal as the second keeper, Aryan Pandey, Anukul Roy and Ayush Doseja make up the rest. Akash Deep is in subject to fitness clearance.

Pant leading a red-ball side in Srinagar while India’s ODI squad works its way through the West Indies series tells its own story about where he sits in India’s white-ball thinking right now. It also gives the Irani Cup a genuine headline name, which this fixture does not always get.

The occasion is the point

Irani Cup weeks are usually quiet. A Ranji winner, a scratch Rest of India XI, five days of first-class cricket in front of a few hundred people, and a result most of the country never notices.

This one is different because of where it is being played. A first-class match of this standing in Srinagar, with the home side arriving as national champions, is the kind of fixture the JKCA has spent decades arguing it deserved. The cricket may well be ordinary. The week will not be.

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