'They shouldn't have closed the door on Mohammed Shami'

His captain has noticed. Whenever East Zone have needed a wicket, in the quarterfinal against North East Zone, in the semifinal against Central Zone, Ishan Kishan says Shami would ask for the ball himself. Not sulking about the omission. Not turning his back on the system that made him.

Which leads to the obvious question. Why?

Bharat Arun, the former India bowling coach who knows Shami as well as anyone, has an answer. “He loves bowling,” Arun tells The Indian Express. “It doesn’t matter whether it is in the nets or in the middle of a game. You give him the red ball, or any ball for that matter, he would mark his run-up and start bowling.”

Arun remembers trying to manage Shami’s workload during his time with the Indian team, and mostly failing. “Some days he would turn up at the nets and say ‘I don’t want to bowl’. But in a matter of a few minutes, he would grab the ball and start bowling. And then you can’t stop him unless he bowls for 45 minutes to one hour. So that’s what makes Shami. He loves bowling irrespective of where he is.”

Eventually Arun found only one method that worked. “So the best way to stop Shami from bowling is, before he leaves the hotel, I will ensure he doesn’t wear his spikes to the ground.”

The spikes are the tell. Shami and his spikes are inseparable, the way a Bharatanatyam dancer is inseparable from her anklets, the start of the same rhythmic act.

“If he wears the spikes, then you know he is in the mood to bowl,” Arun says. “He doesn’t talk much or share his emotional side, but he is someone who takes immense pride in being the fast bowler with the best seam position in the world.”

That pride survived the thing that should have ended his career. At the 2023 World Cup, Shami took 23 wickets in seven matches at an average of 10.70, before an ankle injury and the surgery that followed took nearly a year away from him. He came back to deliver the 2025 Champions Trophy, and has lived on the domestic circuit since. “At the start, he used to try a lot. But he kept learning. And once he realised the seam position is his strength, he just worked around it. He started relishing making batsmen uncomfortable with his movements,” Arun says.

It was never supposed to last this long. When Shami first appeared on the scene, there were doubts about whether he’d sustain it, given how late he’d come to organised coaching, well past his teenage years. The answer was written into his body before it showed up in his numbers. In Sahaspur, he ran on ploughed agricultural fields to build the endurance that carries him, at 36, into his hundredth first-class match, still bowling long spells for a East Zone side chasing its first Duleep Trophy title since 2012-13.

“As a captain, looking at the effort, I felt very nice, because Shami bhai coming in, asking me for those extra overs to get the wickets, it always gives confidence,” Ishan says. “Looking at Shami bhai this season, I feel he has been very different. I’ve seen him in the past, but his approach towards the game, his intensity, his energy has been very different. When you are not regularly playing for the Indian team and to again have that same kind of motivation for your domestic games, it is tough but I feel I see that hunger in him. I think he has that hunger and that motivation right now like he wants to do that comeback, he wants to be part of Indian squad again and which you can see in him.”

Did India shut the door too early? Arun doesn’t hedge. “They shouldn’t have closed the door on Shami,” he says. “There is still plenty of cricket left in him. When someone is performing, age shouldn’t be a factor. You see his durability. It is an outstanding number for the kind of talent he possesses. It is actually befitting for Shami. 100 first-class matches with what he loves most, the red ball.”

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