Surrey lost the Championship’s leading century-maker to England, and signed a Rajasthan captain who has not played red-ball cricket since February
Mahipal Lomror has never played for India, averages 42.62 in first-class cricket and has a triple hundred. Surrey have six matches left and one win from eight.
Aug 19, 2026
Dan Lawrence has scored 788 Championship runs at 65.66 this summer, with five hundreds, more than anyone else in the competition. On Wednesday he is at Headingley instead, back in England’s Test squad for the first time in two years. Will Jacks has spent most of the season managing an ankle problem. That left Surrey six matches from the end of a season needing a middle-order batter who can also bowl spin, and the man they found captains Rajasthan.
Mahipal Lomror has signed for the rest of the County Championship and joins before Thursday’s match against Nottinghamshire at the Oval.
What Surrey are actually getting
Lomror is 26, bats left-handed, bowls slow left-arm orthodox, and has never played for India. That last part is worth sitting with, because the first-class record is better than plenty of capped players manage: 3,836 runs at 42.62 from 63 matches with ten hundreds, and 62 wickets at 32.87 with one five-for.
His career-best is the 300 not out against Uttarakhand at Dehradun in November 2024. It took him 360 balls, with 25 fours and 13 sixes, and carried Rajasthan to 660 for 7 declared. The game was drawn, which tells you plenty about the pitch, but a triple hundred scored at better than a run a ball is not something a flat surface hands you.
Alec Stewart, Surrey’s director of men’s cricket, was blunt about the brief. “With the loss of Lawrence and Jacks’ ability to bowl spin, it was important to add a batter who can bowl some overs of spin when required for the final stage of the season,” he said.
He has not played a first-class match since February
Here is the awkward part. Lomror’s last red-ball appearance finished on 1 February, against Puducherry, and he made 131 in it. Everything since has been white-ball cricket. He now walks into Division One in late August, on English pitches, against the side leading the table.
Stewart approached him on 8 August. Lomror pulled out of a scheduled trip to South Africa and flew over on Monday. “Playing in the County Championship is a huge opportunity for me to challenge myself in a new environment and learn from an experienced group,” he said.
One win in eight, two years after three in a row
What makes the signing worth noticing is where Surrey have ended up. They won the Championship in 2022, 2023 and 2024, the first county to take three straight since Yorkshire between 1966 and 1968. Nottinghamshire ended that last season with their first title since 2010.
This year Surrey have won one match out of eight. Five draws, two defeats, seventh of ten on 91 points, with Nottinghamshire top on 116. The title went a while ago. What is left is six games to make the summer look less peculiar than it does, and Surrey are spending the run-in recruiting cover rather than defending anything.
The India pipeline has stopped being a novelty
The most striking thing about the move is how ordinary it now is. R Sai Kishore signed a six-match deal with Gloucestershire in July and is available from Thursday’s game at Cheltenham, after taking 11 wickets in two matches for Surrey last year. Kuldeep Yadav joined Yorkshire in July for five One-Day Cup games and three Championship matches. Sai Sudharsan has had several spells at the Oval.
Indian cricketers turning up in county squads used to be an event. Two of them arriving for the same Championship run-in, in the same week, on identical six-match deals, looks more like a recruitment habit. Yorkshire, Kuldeep’s county, are among the sides Surrey still have to play.
For Lomror, who is coming up on ten years of being one of the better batters in Indian domestic cricket without an India cap, it is six matches in front of a different set of selectors.