36 Ranji wickets and an 8 for 90: Agarkar's 'body allows only T20s' line on Shami does not survive his own season

"His body currently allows only T20s." That is what chief selector Ajit Agarkar offered in Guwahati on Tuesday when explaining why Mohammed Shami is not in either of India's squads for the Afghanistan series. The line is tidy, it is quotable, and it does not really match what Shami has actually been bowling.

The Ranji season the selectors did not pick up

Shami spent the 2025-26 Ranji Trophy doing the opposite of "T20s only." He sent down red-ball overs in long Indian winters, finished sixth on the wicket-takers' list, and produced what is now the best first-class innings haul of his career. Across the season he took 36 wickets in 12 innings at an average of 16.52, with three five-wicket bags and a career-best 8 for 90 against Jammu and Kashmir in the semi-final. Whatever else that is, it is not the workload of a bowler restricted to four-over bursts.

The IPL 2026 column is more mixed. Across 12 matches for Lucknow Super Giants he took ten wickets at an economy of 8.80, with a high point of 2 for 9 against former franchise SRH and a low point that ended in his being dropped for Tuesday night's loss to Rajasthan in Jaipur. Decent without being decisive. The selectors are entitled to read that as a player who is not yet running through good white-ball line-ups. But "decent IPL" does not equal "can only bowl T20s," especially when the four-day evidence sits on the table next to it.

What the Agarkar line is really doing

Take the explanation at face value and the logic almost works: Shami is 35, returning from a long absence with an ankle issue that needed surgery, and the BCCI has reasons to manage him gently. Reading between the lines, though, the call is less about workload and more about the side India wants to send. The Afghanistan Test from June 6 is a development window. Gurnoor Brar gets a maiden call. Manav Suthar and Harsh Dubey carry over from the white-ball pipeline. Prasidh Krishna and Mohammed Siraj front the pace attack. That is a forward-look squad, not a "best available 11" squad.

If you are putting Bumrah on a beach, you are picking the bowlers you want to test in red-ball cricket for the rest of the cycle. Shami at 35, with a recent surgery in his medical file, was never going to fit that brief whatever his Ranji numbers said. The honest version of the Agarkar quote would be closer to "we are not picking Shami for a Test we are using to look at younger options," but that sentence is harder to deliver from a press chair than "his body only allows T20s." The body line lands. It also forecloses the conversation.

The case against the case

The trouble with foreclosing the conversation is that Shami's last international match was the Champions Trophy 2025 final at Dubai, where he took nine wickets across the tournament including a five-for against Bangladesh and the wicket of Daryl Mitchell, New Zealand's top scorer, in the final itself. That was March 9, 2025. Fourteen months and one Ranji Trophy later, an Indian selector is using "body permits only T20s" as the reason for keeping him out. Either something dramatic changed in the last fortnight, or the public reason is doing different work to the actual one.

None of this is to argue Shami should be in the Afghanistan squad over Bumrah's rest plan or Brar's debut. He probably should not be, because the squad makes its own sense for what India is building toward. But the framing matters. Telling a 35-year-old who just put 36 four-day wickets on his card that his body has decided he is a T20 bowler is a sentence selectors should be careful with. Workload-managed is one thing. Quietly aged-out is another. Saying the second while claiming the first is what makes the explanation grate.

What happens next

Shami still has a route back. India's white-ball tour of England begins after the Afghanistan window, and Bumrah is being preserved for that block. If the selectors want a senior seamer to share new-ball duties with Siraj or Prasidh once they are in English conditions, the Bengal pacer is the obvious second name on the list. By then, his IPL numbers will be a closed file and the Ranji data will be the most recent red-ball evidence anyone has. He has done his part. The next move belongs to a room that, on Tuesday, chose to talk about his body instead of his cricket.

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