Breaking new boundaries: Rudraneil Sengupta writes on J&K’s Ranji win

Every state that is not a cricketing powerhouse yet should sit up and take note of what J&K did right, to get to the pinnacle of the domestic game.

This team has been playing the Ranji for 67 years, yet, for a variety of interconnected reasons — internal strife, political instability, militancy, lack of jobs, a poor economy — has had only the most bare-bones infrastructure. To begin with, there are just two stadiums in the region: Sher-i-Kashmir in Srinagar and Maulana Azad in Jammu. Both lay disused and dysfunctional until repairs began ahead of the 2025-26 Ranji season.

Cricket academies, nets and other facilities are too few, and remain concentrated in the same two cities.

Auqib Nabi, the 29-year-old fast-bowler who spearheaded J&K’s Ranji campaign with a remarkable 60 wickets this season (the highest in the tournament; he is, in fact, one of only a handful of bowlers ever to take 60 or more wickets in Ranji history), comes from Baramulla, where he learnt to play cricket on cleared patches of farmland.

“It’s still hard to find proper pitches, turf or nets in Baramulla,” he said, when we spoke days ahead of the win. When it was apparent that he had the potential to be a really good player, coaches and friends advised him to leave J&K and look for opportunities elsewhere. He joined a club in Bengaluru.

His arc, with small tweaks, can be used to trace the journeys of all his Ranji teammates.

Amid the lack of infrastructure and long decades of being the whipping boys of domestic cricket, J&K’s transformation began with one man’s belief.

When Irfan Pathan joined the state team as player and mentor in 2018, he saw something of himself in the young men’s hunger to succeed. “It’s the same mentality as an up-and-coming Mumbai cricketer,” Pathan has said in interviews. “If you are coming from Jogeshwari or Andheri, you have to go to town on a local train carrying a kit bag. You take two hours just to reach the ground. Then you have to make sure that you have full concentration when you get your chance.”

In this atmosphere, Pathan realised his first task was to encourage a new kind of mindset in J&K’s players, whether beginners or members of the state squad. They had to believe that their game mattered, that they were already in possession of all the raw ingredients they needed in order to succeed.

Pathan spent two years in J&K, but unearthed more than half the players who scripted this season’s Ranji fairytale, from Nabi to the big-hitting Abdul Samad.

Soon after Pathan left, Mithun Manhas, who is now president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), was appointed head of development for J&K cricket. Over a couple of years, he built an elite atmosphere for the state’s senior team, getting the ball rolling by handpicking coaches, including head coach Ajay Sharma from Delhi, bowling coach P Krishnakumar from Bengaluru and fielding coach Dishant Yagnik from Rajasthan. They were then invited to develop the team as they wished, with a long rope in terms of time.

On Krishnakumar’s advice, Manhas had a pacy, bouncy pitch laid at Sher-i-Kashmir, with a view to developing fast-bowling talent. Krishnakumar then spent almost a year there, in relentless training with his core bowling unit.

“The first thing for me was to bring them out of their inferiority complex,” he told me. “And make them understand that they were as good as anybody, and it was just a matter of execution and mental strength. That automatically made them want to develop their skills too. Nabi, for example, must have bowled at least a thousand balls that season just to master his wrist position.”

A change in mentality for players, a dedicated team of coaches planning for success, and an administration that cares. That is (clearly) a recipe for success.

(Email feedback to rudraneil@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal)