Cracked Pitch, Empty Chair: Shams Mulani's 279 Wickets and India's Most Crowded Lane

The pitch in Puducherry began to crack in the fourth innings. Just as the bed of a dry river shows its first fissure at the end of summer, so the soil begins to reveal its secret to a spinner. Shams Mulani stood at the top of his run-up, the ball in his left palm, his eyes carrying that patience only the long days of domestic cricket can teach. I was watching the India A versus Australia A series from a small room in Dhaka, the volume almost off, because the silence of those empty stands has always felt truer to me than any roar. Mulani did not conjure magic that day. He put the ball in the right places and let the cracked wicket do the rest. Afterwards, he said exactly that—let the cracked wicket do its own work. That is a rare honesty in cricket: no claim to heroism, only a craftsman's patience.

Shams Mulani is now 29. A left-arm orthodox spinner from Mumbai and a lower-order batter. In 61 first-class matches he has 279 wickets—an average of 4.57 per match. Beside that sit 2,632 runs at 31.71. Read those two numbers together and it becomes clear that Mulani is not merely a spinner; he is a complete package, the kind Indian selection language calls a two-in-one.

In the recently concluded India A versus Australia A series he was named Player of the Series. That recognition weighs more than a routine domestic haul, because the opposition was no soft touch. In the side led by Peter Handscomb, seven players had already played Test cricket, and the captain himself carried 20 Tests of experience. To be the best player of a series against such an opponent is a sentence meant to leave a mark in the selectors' notebooks.

He returned to the India A side after a two-year gap. The series held a seven-wicket match haul, a three-wicket spell, and a saving 29 with the bat. The familiar Mumbai environment—Tushar Deshpande, Tanush Kotian and Mulani—seemed to warm up nicely before the Ranji season. When that trio clicks together, Mumbai's spin attack becomes a distinct force in domestic cricket, and Mulani's own case grows stronger within it.

I have heard one thing about Mumbai's cricket culture many times, and it stops me every time. On the city's maidans, boys queue before the first light; five of them share a single ball; when the ball splits, they stitch it with thread and use it again. A boy who rises from that maidan develops a strange patience in his palms—he knows success does not arrive in a day, it arrives like a season. Mulani's 279 wickets are precisely the arithmetic of that patience.

India has a long heritage of left-arm spin—Bishan Singh Bedi, Maninder Singh, and later Ravindra Jadeja. That line is never empty. I live in Bangladesh, and the left-arm spin tradition here is no less rich—Shakib Al Hasan, Taijul Islam, Mehidy Hasan Miraz. Two countries, two sets of names, but the grammar of the craft is the same: reading the air before release, reading the angle of a batter's shoulder, waiting patiently on cracked earth. Mulani and Bangladesh's spinners learn that grammar together.

But this is where the real story hides. The man chasing a place in the selectors' minds through 279 wickets may not, in fact, be armed first with those wickets. Mulani's genuinely differentiating strength is his batting. An average of 31.71 is not merely lower-order runs; it is the kind of number that turns a spinner into a two-in-one, and in India's domestic structure that package carries a separate price.

Indian selection history loves this package. Jadeja's entire career is the proof—a left-arm spinner who can change a match with the bat is someone no one wants to leave out in home Tests. Axar Patel is built on the same mould. Kuldeep Yadav adds the variety of wrist-spin. So the biggest line on Mulani's CV is not his wickets, but his runs—because the runs are what place him in the Jadeja-successor template.

Yet however elegant the package, the lane is frighteningly crowded. India's Test spin tier already holds Jadeja, Axar and Kuldeep. Behind them, Manav Suthar has made a bright start in Test cricket and leapfrogged many. Then come competitors such as Harsh Dubey, Sai Kishore and Nishant Sindhu. In this crowd, Mulani sits in the outermost room, knocking on the door.

India's most crowded lane is left-arm spin. Mulani is not filling the seat of some rare talent; he stands in the very alley where Jadeja, Axar and Suthar are all left-armers. No amount of form can cut through that crowd on its own; it is cut through by waiting and by someone else's retirement. This is a structural feature of Indian selection: the pipeline is so deep that even the owner of 279 wickets can be blocked by one man's faster rise.

Still, form cannot be left unused. Mulani's method splits into two parts, and both belong to the classic red-ball spinner's psychology. Early in the series he deliberately varied his pace so that visiting batters could not settle. Australia's batters were aggressive, charging at the wicket—against such an opponent, a patient spinner's job is to build pressure, to lock one end and let chances open at the other.

And that is exactly where the pitch matters. Puducherry's soil began to crack in the fourth innings, and that is when Mulani shifted into an attacking mode. Hold first, attack later—this is the two-faced education of a red-ball spinner, something never learned in the four overs of T20. His 279 wickets are the harvest of that long education, and the Player of the Series award is a recognition of it.

The days of Ranji are the classroom of that education. At dawn the curator arrives, coughing as he pulls the roller; the scorer sits before a near-empty gallery; the tea seller waits with a hot kettle, though he does not know if anyone will come in the afternoon. These people are cricket's slow industry—their names never enter the broadcast, yet without their labour Mulani's 279 wickets could never have been written. The pressure a spinner builds lives in the soil, and it is the curator who tends that soil; a wicket is, in truth, a joint work of two hands.

I have watched this slow cricket for many years. To me, the difference between Ranji's empty stands and a Test's thundering gallery is not only one of spectators—it is one of memory. A player who builds himself on those empty grounds learns a kind of patience that does not dry up under sudden fame. That patience, rather, grants him a longer career, and it is Mulani's greatest asset.

This is where my doubt begins. Mulani himself has said the selection process is not in his hands, and that when his time comes he will certainly be picked. The restraint in that sentence is admirable—no demand, only belief. But the architecture outside the story is less kind.

The story everyone is telling—that Mulani is next in line—is really an optimistic simplification. The reality is that he is one of many standing behind Suthar. If Suthar takes up Jadeja's inheritance, the left-arm spin seat could stay closed for three to five years—and by then Mulani's 29 will have become 32 or 33. A spinner's peak is roughly 28 to 34, meaning his window is widest right now; delay means the erosion of opportunity.

Suthar's record sharpens the doubt—179 wickets in 38 matches, 4.71 per match, marginally better than Mulani's 4.57. Sai Kishore adds another comparison with 245 wickets in 60 matches. In raw bowling numbers, then, Mulani is not clearly ahead; he sits inside a tight cluster, and within that cluster the tie will break on batting and conditions—not directly on wickets.

The second caution is the 2026-26 season. Across five seasons his wickets read 45, 46, 35, 44, and most recently 30—the lowest of the five-year window. His recent baseline is around 44. If the season is incomplete, that number means nothing; if it is complete, it is a genuine warning that must be verified. One number cannot judge a man, but ignoring one number is also a mistake.

The third caution is condition-dependence. The standout performance came on a fourth-innings turning pitch, the kind of wicket that gifts a spinner. We have no information about how he fares on seaming or flat decks. A spinner successful on home soil often becomes another man on foreign pitches—this is nothing new, yet it is easy to forget. Outside India, on someone else's cracked pitch, proving his patience is his next examination.

Still, there is hope, and it lives in the domestic structure. At the BCCI Centre of Excellence, Mulani was given a clear briefing on his role before the series—coaches such as Sunil Joshi and Rishikesh Kanitakar told him exactly what was being asked of him. This preparation pathway is real, and it is through this pathway that domestic performance turns into a Test cap. The India A series is, in effect, an official audition before the selectors, and Mulani has made his name ring loudly there.

The next step on that path is Ranji. If the Deshpande-Kotian-Mulani trio clicks together for Mumbai, Mulani's case before the selectors will grow stronger still. A huge Ranji season—45 to 50 wickets and a batting average above 35—is the only way he can build a real claim to cut through the crowd. Through form he can gather only the argument; whether the window opens is left to time.

To me this story is not the rise of a star; it is a story of waiting. A cracked pitch, an empty chair, and a craftsman who knows his time may come, or may not. He did not run through history; history ran through him and left mud on his boots. I do not count trophies; I count the moments a boy forgot the score and remembered the game.

The pitch is a page, and every delivery writes a sentence no one can erase. Mulani's page is still unfinished. In the coming Ranji season a new line will be added—whether of wickets or of runs, it will be decided by time, form and a little luck. The loudest moments of a match are often hidden in the silences between deliveries. That silence of Mulani's is now knocking on the selectors' door. Only one question remains: will the door open, or will it be drowned out by the noise of the crowd?