Shami’s 16 overs cost 42 runs at Chepauk, and Ganguly says he has not been neglected
Sourav Ganguly was asked why Mohammed Shami is still not in India’s side, and answered by talking about his own career. The bowler in question had just helped East Zone end a 13-year wait.
Sep 11, 2026
Sourav Ganguly was asked about Mohammed Shami a day after East Zone had won the Duleep Trophy, and he did not accept the premise of the question.
“He is not being neglected,” the former India captain and BCCI president said. “He has played a lot and is a champion. This happens as you get older. I was dropped from ODI cricket despite scoring over 10,000 runs, but found my way back into the team. This happens to everyone.”
The question keeps coming because the arithmetic keeps getting worse. Shami last bowled for India in the Champions Trophy final in March 2025, the night India beat New Zealand in Dubai. Eighteen months on he has been picked for nothing: no Tests, no ODIs, no T20Is. He is 36. And through all of it he has kept turning up for Bengal and for East Zone and taking wickets, which is what a discarded fast bowler is supposed to do and also what makes his absence harder to explain away.
The Duleep Trophy gave him a stage
East Zone won the Duleep Trophy this week for the first time since 2012-13, and Shami was central to it. The final at the MA Chidambaram Stadium in Chennai was decided on first-innings lead, East Zone’s 708 against South Zone’s 336, on a red-soil surface that offered a seam bowler almost nothing. Shami’s figures were 16-5-42-2, with Ravichandran Smaran and Sheikh Rasheed the wickets. On a pitch that flat, five maidens in sixteen overs is the statistic worth staring at.
It was also his 100th first-class match, a landmark he reached in the week he turned 36.
Ganguly framed all of that as the good news rather than the grievance.
“What makes me happy is that Shami is performing well in the domestic circuit, which is terrific to see, and he has achieved a lot,” he said.
There is a reading of that answer where a former administrator is protecting the selection system he helped build. There is another where he is describing what the back end of a long career actually looks like from someone who went through it. Ganguly’s own point about being left out with more than 10,000 ODI runs behind him is his, not ours, and he did come back afterwards. What he did not do was engage with the specific version of the argument people are making about Shami, which is not about age in the abstract but about a 36-year-old outbowling everyone else in the country’s premier first-class competition and still not getting a call.
Kishan got the warmer answer
The other name put to Ganguly was Ishan Kishan, who made 270 in the final and took the player-of-the-match award with it. Kishan has played two Tests in his life, both on the 2023 tour of the West Indies, the second of them at Port of Spain in July that year. He has spent the seasons since assembling exactly the domestic record that used to be the entire selection case.
“It’s terrific and remarkable,” Ganguly said. “Every young player wants to play Test cricket, and hopefully he will.”
That is a nudge rather than a campaign, but it points somewhere the selectors have not gone. Kishan’s route back is almost certainly as a wicketkeeper rather than a specialist batter, and the man in possession of those gloves has not given anyone a reason to move him.
Nobody is committing to 2027
Asked whether Shami could still figure in India’s plans for the next 50-over World Cup, Ganguly declined the invitation outright.
“October 2027 is a long time away, and I cannot comment on it,” he said.
He is right about the distance. That tournament starts on 4 October 2027 in South Africa, with Zimbabwe and Namibia hosting a handful of games, and India have not settled on a first-choice pace attack for it. Jasprit Bumrah’s workload will shape most of what follows. Shami at 37, in African conditions, bowling the way he bowled at Chepauk, would be a stranger omission than a selection.
His own framing, after the trophy was handed over, was blunter than anything Ganguly offered. “No matter the stage, your eyes should always be on the next level,” he said. He has not stopped looking up.