Mumbai left Suryakumar out of the Ranji Trophy, and now he will captain them in the Mushtaq Ali and Vijay Hazare
Mumbai’s selectors kept Suryakumar Yadav out of their four-day side in October. They have now picked the former India T20I captain to lead them in both white-ball competitions.
Nov 6, 2026
A month ago Mumbai’s selectors decided Suryakumar Yadav was not ready for four-day cricket. Now they want him in charge of their white-ball sides. According to a Times of India report, the senior selection committee under Rajesh Pawar has picked him to captain Mumbai in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and the Vijay Hazare Trophy this season.
The squad has not been named yet. A source close to the panel said it will be picked on 9 November, with the players leaving for Kolkata two days later.
Hyderabad first, in Kolkata
Mumbai are in Elite Group D of the Mushtaq Ali Trophy with Hyderabad, Gujarat, Goa, Vidarbha, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Uttarakhand. They open against Hyderabad on 14 November, the day the Elite stage starts, and each side plays seven group games.
It is a strange place to find a man who was lifting the T20 World Cup in Ahmedabad on 8 March. Three months later the selectors made Shreyas Iyer India’s T20I captain and left Suryakumar out of the squad altogether. He is 36. In an interview on Aakash Chopra’s YouTube channel in August he said he still could not see the logic: India had not lost a T20I series in two years under him, and had won the Asia Cup and the World Cup.
The Ranji door stayed shut
Mumbai’s handling of him has gone two ways at once. He made himself available for the Ranji Trophy and was still left out of the opener against Chandigarh in October. Pawar said he had not played red-ball cricket for around a year and a half. His only recent games were for MIG Cricket Club in the MCA President’s Cup, a T20 tournament, which the panel did not count as enough, and an MCA source also pointed to him missing the pre-season camp.
Twenty-over cricket asks nothing of that kind. It is the format he made his name in, and Mumbai have seen what he can do in it at domestic level. In November 2019, captaining them against Karnataka in Surat, he finished on 94 not out from 53 balls to win a Mushtaq Ali Trophy game by seven wickets.
How last season went
Shardul Thakur led Mumbai in last season’s Mushtaq Ali Trophy, with Iyer injured. In the Vijay Hazare Trophy they lost a rain-affected quarter-final to Karnataka in Bengaluru in January.
His IPL future is less clear. Franchises have until 17 November to submit their retention lists, three days into the Mushtaq Ali Trophy. There have been reports linking him with Lucknow Super Giants, and there has been no official word from Mumbai Indians. So he will be leading his state side through the week that decides his IPL club for next season. A few T20s in Kolkata are unlikely to change the selectors’ minds about India. They could still make the retention call easier for whoever wants him.