Shams Mulani: The Ledger of 279 Wickets and the Invisible Wall of India's Spin Queue

On the Puducherry surface, as the ball began to grip through the fingers in the fourth innings, the cracks in the pitch were talking louder than the scoreboard. Shams Mulani was changing his pace — quicker at times, slower at others, sometimes landing the ball four or five inches outside off so the batter could not trust his pad. Australia A's batters came at him aggressively; seven of them had played Test cricket, led by 20-Test veteran Peter Handscomb. Mulani built pressure first, then let the pitch do the rest. He finished the series with the Player-of-the-Series award.

That night I opened my laptop and pulled out a ledger I have kept for years — a plain record of red-ball domestic cricket. On it: 279 wickets in 61 First-Class matches, which is 4.57 per match. Directly below: 2,632 runs at 31.71.

The numbers are that clean, and yet a cricketer still has to say publicly, "My name has to be up there in selectors' minds." That one line is the real anomaly here. A 29-year-old spinner in India's left-arm lane who was selected purely on numbers would not need to make the ask out loud.

Let us fix the context first. Every data point around Mulani sits in the red-ball domain — Ranji Trophy, Duleep Trophy, and India A matches treated as unofficial Tests. That is the Test pathway, not the T20 or ODI market. So his average, his wicket tallies and his strike data must be measured only against First-Class and Test benchmarks. Read through a white-ball lens and the arithmetic walks off in the wrong direction, which is the most common error in stories like this.

The India A versus Australia A bilateral series is the centre of this story. The opposition was not an ordinary domestic side — seven Test-capped players under Handscomb. His Player-of-the-Series award is therefore not a routine domestic haul but a return against a step up in quality. That single fact adds weight to his case, and at the same time raises the question: how much can be concluded from a two-match sample?

There is another detail that slips past easily: it took him two years to return to the India A side. This is not a story of uninterrupted ascent but of a comeback after slipping out of the selection picture. In between, he kept working through Ranji and Duleep, and before the series he received clear role briefings from coaches Sunil Joshi and Rishikesh Kanitakar at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. The preparation here is institutional, not a personal hunch.

The mark of that briefing showed inside the match. In the first innings his plan was to build pressure — not to tempt the set batter with boundary balls but to force patience. In the fourth innings he switched roles: landing the ball in the right areas and letting the pitch work, rather than trying to be the hero himself. That is the classic two-mode red-ball spinner — holding early, attacking late.

Now let us walk the ledger row by row. At 4.57 wickets per match, he sits inside the normal band of 4 to 5 for elite domestic spinners. In volume terms he is within the band, not outside the door. A domestic spinner with that many wickets cannot simply be struck off the list of players who "should" be called up.

But his real differentiator is not spin, it is batting — 2,632 runs at 31.71. The normal band for a lower-order all-rounder is roughly 25 to 30, and 31.71 sits above it. Indian selection history has consistently paid for this "two-in-one" profile, especially in home Tests where the XI needs both batting depth and a fifth bowling option. That is the technical basis of Mulani's confidence.

Look at the season-by-season wicket line: 45, 46, 35, 44, 30. The first four numbers paint a workhorse — not an explosion, but stability. There is no breakout season in that line, and that is precisely his weakest argument in front of the selection committee. The fifth number — 30 — is the biggest caution, but a conditional one: if the season is still running, the number means nothing. If the season is complete, a move below his band is a meaningful signal. I am not willing to extract the word "decline" from it without verification.

Placed side by side with his peers, the picture gets more honest. Manav Suthar: 179 wickets in 38 matches, or 4.71 per match. Sai Kishore: 245 in 60, or 4.08. Mulani sits at 4.57, right in the middle — in the competition, but clearly ahead of no one. The gap is small enough that the tiebreaker will be batting and conditions, not raw wicket counts.

He is 29. A spinner's peak usually runs from 28 to 34. The window is open now, but narrow — and every season shrinks it further.

Without understanding the queue, half this story falls away. On the top tier of India's spin depth chart sit Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav, all three trending toward the back end of their peaks. Right behind is Suthar, who has leapfrogged the field with a bright start in Test cricket. Behind him: Harsh Dubey, Sai Kishore, Nishant Sindhu. Mulani is in that list, in its most crowded lane. Jadeja, Axar, Suthar and Mulani are all left-arm spin; Mulani is not filling a rare niche, he is fighting in the busiest room.

So the contest here is not against an opponent but against colleagues. It is a long queue for a limited number of home-Test spin slots. And in that queue, Suthar moving a step ahead blocks Mulani's most natural entry point, because Suthar is also left-arm spin.

Domestically, however, he has one advantage beside him. Mumbai's trio — Tushar Deshpande, Tanush Kotian and Mulani — has warmed up nicely before the Ranji season. Familiar environment, familiar role, familiar workload. That comfort does not show up in a number, but it affects series results.

Inside the match haul, his work came in two forms: a seven-wicket match haul in one game, and a three-wicket haul with a saving 29 in another. He played two roles in the same series — lead bowling attack and lower-order batting. That is his cleanest sales pitch to selectors: one slot, two problems solved.

This is where my model raises its hand. A two-match sample is small. Returning after two years means this is a re-entry spike, not a trend. The Burnley model broke, and I rebuilt it one clean row at a time — and that is where I learned that building a large conclusion on a small sample is the most expensive error available. With Mulani, I am not treating correlation as causation. The Player-of-the-Series badge and a Test cap are not joined by a straight arrow.

Venue effect cannot be left out of the arithmetic either. The Puducherry pitch cracked and assisted spin by the fourth innings. The selection of a left-arm spinner there was a conditions-driven choice; on a flatter or seaming deck, the same performance profile may not reproduce. That line sits on its own in my ledger, because conditions-driven performance and a bowler's own skill are not the same thing.

The largest overreach hides in the Jadeja-succession narrative. The story is attractive: a man waits, and the day the all-rounder retires, he walks in. The reality is that Dubey, Kishore and Sindhu are standing in that same line alongside Suthar. If Suthar consolidates his Test start, the "next left-arm spinner" slot could stay closed for three to five years — by which time Mulani is thirty-two to thirty-four.

Now the place where football analytics helps, though not without a translation layer. In 2026 my model predicted Burnley's relegation because it could not capture their overperformance on set-piece xG and post-shot xG. Mulani's hidden variables are two: fourth-innings pitch assistance, and the visitors' aggressive intent, which generates wickets from pressure. France taught me that a low block is just a different kind of data; in cricket it does not map letter for letter. In football a low block suppresses shots; spin containment produces wickets from pressure — different mechanics. When the Bundesliga returned, the silence rewrote every home-advantage coefficient; cricket's equivalent variable is the pitch, not the crowd. Force the analogy without that distinction and the arithmetic breaks.

I let variance sit in the room until it finally spoke. It has not finished its sentence yet — two matches is not enough.

So Mulani's selection is not a question of form, it is a question of timing. 279 wickets and a 31.71 average are no accident; but whether Jadeja and Axar are rested or retire, and whether Suthar sustains his run, will decide when his call comes.

Next season I will watch five things. One, his final Ranji wicket tally — is 30 final or partial. Two, workload signals around Jadeja and Axar, where rest or absence means an open window. Three, Suthar's Test continuity. Four, Mulani's performance on seaming or flat decks — whether the condition-dependence risk drops. Five, further India A call-ups.

I stopped treating the model as a prophecy and started treating it as a confessional. The ledger of 279 wickets has left a question on the page today, not an answer: good cricketers are made by numbers, but opportunities are made by queues — and how short that queue becomes is not in Mulani's hands.