Auqib Nabi’s visa came through on Saturday, and Surrey have him for three Championship games

Auqib Nabi’s work visa came through on Saturday. He got on the first flight to England he could find, and on Wednesday morning he walked out at the Kia Oval as a Surrey player, for the start of a County Championship match against Yorkshire. It is the first of three games the club have signed him for.

The BCCI wanted him bowling with a red ball in September

This was not a county spotting a gap in its attack and making a call. The BCCI facilitated the move, and the reason for it sits at the end of the year. India play two Tests in New Zealand in November, the first at the Basin Reserve in Wellington from 19 to 23 November and the second at Hagley Oval in Christchurch from 27 November to 1 December. Those are seaming pitches at the start of a New Zealand summer, and there is very little between now and then in the Indian calendar that prepares a fast bowler for them.

English county cricket in September does. The ball moves and the light goes early, and pitches at the back end of a season have had a lot of cricket on them already. Three four-day matches inside a fortnight is also a heavy workload for a 29-year-old who has bowled an enormous amount in the last two years, which is presumably part of the point.

Sixty wickets, and a title nobody expected

Nabi finished the 2025-26 Ranji Trophy as the leading wicket-taker in the country. He took 60 wickets in 10 matches at 12.56, with seven five-wicket hauls, and was named the tournament’s Player of the Year. Jammu and Kashmir won the Ranji Trophy in February 2026, the first time they had won it.

He is from Sheeri, in Baramulla, and the nickname he picked up along the way is the Baramulla Express. In August 2025 he took four wickets in four balls in the Duleep Trophy, which had never been done before in that tournament. Delhi Capitals paid 8.4 crore rupees for him at the 2026 IPL auction after four franchises went after him.

And still no Test cap

What he does not have is a Test match. Nabi was called into India’s squad for the tour of Sri Lanka last month as the replacement for the injured Jasprit Bumrah, and he did not play. India went into the Galle Test with two seamers, Mohammed Siraj and Prasidh Krishna, on a surface where the left-arm spinner Manav Suthar took ten wickets in the match and India won by 165 runs. There was never much room for a third quick. He also played for India A in Sri Lanka, taking six wickets in two first-class games.

So he arrives in England having spent a year as the most productive red-ball bowler in India without ever quite being the bowler India picked. Two Tests in New Zealand, in conditions that suit what he does, is the clearest opening he has had, and three matches at Surrey is the closest thing to an audition anyone was going to arrange for him.

He has joined a side in trouble

Surrey are not the team he might have pictured joining. They sit eighth of ten in Division One on 105 points, with one win, three defeats and six draws from ten matches, nearer the relegation places than to Nottinghamshire, Somerset and Warwickshire, who are covered by eight points at the top with the title still open.

After Yorkshire, Nabi goes to Sussex on 8 September, then comes back to the Oval for Glamorgan on 15 September. Two of those three opponents sit in the top half of the table and Surrey need something from all of them. A bowler who took seven five-fors in ten Ranji Trophy matches is a useful thing to have handed to you in the first week of September, whoever arranged it and whatever it is really for.

Stay across the latest from Indian cricket