279 Wickets, a 31.71 Average, Still Waiting: Why Shams Mulani's Queue Is So Long

The fourth innings at Puducherry. The cracks had widened enough that the spinner no longer needed to do much — just land the ball in the right place. Australia A's batters were pushing forward, attacking, and that was exactly why wickets were falling. Seven in the match. Player of the Series at the end of it.

I watched it from Manchester, an old habit from growing up in Bangladesh — I do not trust a spinner's numbers without knowing what the pitch was doing. The series figure gives relief first. Then it gives a question: 279 first-class wickets in 61 matches, 4.57 per game, and still no Test cap. The thread started as a question, then became a method. The question is not whether Shams Mulani is good enough. It is why a profile this good is still standing outside the line.

Context — the rooms I keep separate

Every number here lives in the red-ball room: Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy, India A's unofficial Tests. That is the Test staircase, not the T20 one. A 4.57 wickets-per-match record and a 31.71 batting average cannot be judged on white-ball benchmarks. Mixing formats is the most common error in cricket numeracy, and the cheapest fix is to write the format beside the number.

I use four measures for Mulani. Volume — total wickets and wickets per match. Peer cluster — what the other left-arm spinners in his lane are doing. Batting value — the lower-order contribution. Season band — five seasons placed side by side to see whether a trend exists.

One more measure gets left out of these conversations: visibility. Transfer-window talk tracks release clauses and wage bills; cricket's equivalents are retention structures and central contract grades. For a domestic red-ball bowler the arithmetic is harsher, because the evidence is produced where there are no cameras, no crowds, and two or three people in the press box.

I counted the empty seats, then I counted the presses. Watching Ranji streams over recent seasons, the same picture returned: a good bowler bowling, a batter getting out, and nobody behind the camera. A selector who wants to be moved by a delivery either has to be in the ground or has to go back to the archive. The Player of the Series award exists to bridge that gap — India A games have cameras, an international scorecard, and that is the currency of this ladder.

Core — the chain of numbers

First number: 61 matches, 279 wickets. That is a workhorse's record, not a promise. The comparison makes it sharp. Manav Suthar: 179 wickets in 38 matches, 4.71 per game. Sai Kishore: 245 in 60, 4.08. Mulani's 4.57 sits between them. On pure bowling efficiency he is in the contest, but not clearly ahead of anyone. That is the central fact of this story and the least discussed one.

Second number: 2,632 runs at 31.71. This is where the picture changes. The normal benchmark for a lower-order all-rounder is 25 to 30; 31.71 sits above it. Mulani's real differentiator is his batting, not his bowling. A player carrying the Jadeja or Axar package does not simply occupy a selection slot — he creates one, because it eases the balance problem of playing an extra bowler at home.

Third number: the five-season band — 45, 46, 35, 44, 30. The first four describe consistency, not a breakout. The fifth, 30, is a warning. If the season is complete, it is a downward deviation from a recent baseline near 44. If it is ongoing, it means nothing yet. I am marking it as pending verification, because drawing a decline thesis from it without checking BCCI or ESPNcricinfo data would be the biggest analytical debt in this piece.

Fourth: the Australia A series, where his case is strongest. By his own account, seven of the opposition had played Test cricket and the side was led by Peter Handscomb, a 20-Test veteran. Seven wickets and a 29 in that company weigh more than a routine domestic haul, because the batting he beat was experienced. But a condition attaches immediately — the pitch.

The Puducherry surface turned for spinners by the fourth innings, and a left-arm orthodox bowler is the direct beneficiary. Mulani said he varied his pace so visiting batters could not settle, then moved to the right areas on a cracked deck and let the wicket do the rest. That is the classic two-mode red-ball method: hold early, attack late. As a skill it is excellent. As a currency it fluctuates with the surface. On a flat or seaming deck the same plan produces a different result, and we do not have that data.

Fifth: the preparation system. Before the series, Mulani had role-clarity briefings with Sunil Joshi and Rishikesh Kanitakar at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. That is not a small detail. The A tour and the Centre of Excellence now form an official audition channel; a call-up means being on the selection committee's radar. He returned to that channel after two years. That is the strongest part of his case and also its caution: a re-entry burst is not yet a trend.

Sixth: age and timing. Twenty-nine, generally the start of a spinner's peak. He leads Mumbai's attack, and the Mumbai trio of Deshpande, Kotian and Mulani warmed up together for Ranji. A familiar bowling unit playing a big fixture together is more than individual form — it is system fitness.

Seventh: the length of the queue. Established: Jadeja, Axar, Kuldeep. Leapfrogged: Suthar, who has started in Tests. Close behind: Harsh Dubey, Sai Kishore, Nishant Sindhu. Then Mulani. Jadeja, Axar, Suthar and Mulani are all left-arm spin, so Mulani is not filling a rare niche — he is standing in Indian cricket's most crowded lane.

India usually field two or three spinners at home. Jadeja occupies one and bats. Mulani's profile is the closest match to that: left-arm spin, a batting average near thirty. His real contest is not against an opponent. It is against time. He has to knock on a door that opens only when someone inside walks out.

Contrarian — correlation is not causation

The Player of the Series award, 279 wickets, 31.71 — placed together they produce a sentence: he should be playing. That sentence is a correlation, not a cause. A good model should explain the game, not replace it.

First problem: sample size. A two-match series after a two-year absence is a time point, not a trend. I learned this building a 1,500-fan panel in 2026 and matching it against pressing data in empty stadiums. Brighton's numbers shifted, but without separating venue, opponent and schedule the story looked cleaner than it was.

Second: condition dependence. His best work came on a fourth-innings turner. From Wembley to Tokyo to Qatar the pattern held — change the environment and the value of a method changes with it.

Third: the succession story. Framing him as Jadeja's heir carries affection and a gap. Succession is not a contract, it is a schedule, and the schedule is set by Jadeja's body, Axar's form, Kuldeep's role and Suthar's progress. None of those are in Mulani's hands.

Fourth: a low-volume season. If 30 is final, three things arrive together — falling output, a closed lane, rising age. Nobody decides then; time decides for them.

One thing should be said plainly. His numbers are good enough that inflating them would be the greatest disservice to him. Excess expectation is expensive precisely when its foundation is glass.

Takeaway — what I will count next round

Three things in the coming Ranji season, not four. The final wicket tally, because whether 30 is a dip or a trend can change the direction of the whole case. The type of pitch, because taking wickets cheaply on a flat or seaming deck would erase most of the condition-dependence objection. And the workload of Jadeja and Axar, because rest or rotation in a home Test series moves the door — and if it moves, Mulani is the more suitable candidate than Suthar, since batting is the tiebreaker.

The question I leave open is not about numbers but about structure: if India keeps producing spinners this good and lets their peak years pass in a queue, who is that surplus depth for? A statistic is not a verdict. It is a question. Right now the question is not aimed at Mulani. It is aimed at the system.