Rashid Khan, Ian Bishop and the UAE’s youngest first-class cricketer – it sounds like the start of a bad joke. But these are all just stops on leg-spinner Yash Raj Punja’s journey.
He first came to the wider attention of Indian cricket in May 2024, when Ian Bishop posted a photo on social media with “Yash, an 18-year-old leg spinner from Bengaluru”. The photo was taken at the Chennai airport, and featured Bishop alongside Yash – who towered an inch or so over than the former quick.
A tall, promising leg-spinner wouldn’t really go unnoticed in India, but that’s because Punja does not have any professional cricket under his belt as yet. This August in Mysuru, he finished as the second-highest wicket-taker in the Maharaja KSCA T20 Trophy, Karnataka's contribution to the Indian state-level T20 league ecosystem. It was his first season in the competition; his 23 wickets in 10 matches came at 12.48 runs apiece, and with remarkable consistency – he did not take a single four-wicket haul, but took three wickets on five occasions.
Bishop said in his post that Punja was “at least 6ft 6inches tall”. It was viewed nearly 500,000 times on X, and responses went one of two ways; praising Bishop’s commitment to research as a broadcaster, or marveling at Yash’s height (6 '5 " is the number on record now).
Anil Kumble was a shade over six feet tall, and after him, India’s tallest leg spinner was Rahul Sharma, who measured 6 '4 ", but whose international career fizzled out rapidly. All this is to say the novelty of a player that size, with the ability to bowl leg spin, remains.
Tall cricketers are often pushed to take up fast bowling. Punja started out that way too, he tells Wisden.com: “When I was younger, I was a fast bowler. I feel like we all were fast bowlers when we started. But there was an issue with my action.
“I'd be frustrated that I wasn't able to bowl as fast as the other kids, so I just ended up chucking the ball at the last second. Because of that, my coaches just told me to take up leg spin.”
After he was picked up at base price (INR 25,000) by the Hubli Tigers for this year’s Maharaja Trophy, the team’s batting coach, Yere Goud – also the Karnataka domestic team’s head coach – was open about their faith in him: “He has been a net bowler for Rajasthan Royals for the last two years.
“He bowls very controlled, flattish leg spin, bowls the googly, [which is] not that easy to pick up. He will be one of the surprise packages in the tournament for us. We expect performances from him – he has the capacity to win matches.”
Goud first saw Punja playing for Vijaya Cricket Club, on the Bengaluru league circuit. But the leggie’s journey does not begin at Vijaya CC, or in Bengaluru, Karnataka or even India.
Yash Punja's role model and record-breaker in the family
It starts in the UAE, where Punja was born to Indian parents in 2006. He says it was around the age of eight that his cricketing journey really kicked off, and the catalyst came from within the same household.
In November 2015, Punja’s elder brother – fast bowler Yodhin – became the UAE’s youngest first-class cricketer, in an ICC Inter-continental Cup fixture against Hong Kong. He took the wicket of opener Anshuman Rath, who later went on to play for Odisha in the Ranji Trophy, and is now back with Hong Kong for the 2025 Asia Cup.
Five days later, at the age of 16 years and 206 days, Yodhin became the UAE’s youngest international cricketer, in an ODI against the same opposition. A record across genders at the time, it remains so for the men’s team, nearly ten years on.
“I started playing cricket because of my elder brother,” Yash says. “It was a big deal when he played for the UAE men’s (senior) team, and everyone looked up to him. So that's how it started for me as well. I wanted to be like my brother when I was younger.
“When he made his debut for the men's team was around when I started playing cricket as well, when I was eight. It all started off just using him as my role model. I played cricket in UAE for almost eight or nine years, till I was 17.”
In May 2023, Yash represented Abu Dhabi in the Emirates D50 tournament, with a standout performance of 4-44 against Fujairah, which included the wicket of UAE opener Rohan Mustafa. That year, he also shifted base to Bengaluru.
“I didn't move to India as a planned thing,” he says. “I was just there for summer vacation, and I was training at the Six Academy in Bengaluru.
“While I was there, Rajasthan Royals had a camp there with Riyan Parag, Dhruv Jurel, [former Karnataka spinner] KC Cariappa and all those guys. So they had just spotted me because a few of the coaches at Six told them about me and said, ‘If you want someone to bowl in the nets, you can take him.’
“That went well, and they were interested in me. They spoke to my parents, told me to move to India, told my parents that they’d take care of my expenses and all that. So that's where the plan to move to India started, after RR was interested in me. For the past two years, since then, I've just been going for any camps they have throughout the year. They usually have one once a month.”
In the Maharaja Trophy, Yash was one of only two bowlers in the competition to take more than 20 wickets, alongside death-overs specialist Kranthi Kumar of the Mangaluru Dragons.
He went wicketless in his first game of the campaign, and took three in his second. One ball after removing Harshil Dharmani in his third match of the season, he really grabbed the attention.
Karnataka stalwart Manish Pandey came out to face his first delivery, which was dropped short and outside off stump. Pandey went back and across, setting up to viciously flay a loosener through point. To his horror, the ball spun back in sharply. It cramped him for room, took the bottom edge and hit the stumps – a googly that he never saw coming.
It is no surprise that Yash’s googly is so deceptive. Batters are trained to look for the ball coming out of the back of the hand to spot one, but his comes out of the side of the hand. The difference in release from the leg-break is almost imperceptible.
'My brother told me how Mujeeb and Rashid bowl the googly'
Like his cricketing journey itself, he partly owes this to Yodhin: “When he was captaining the UAE U19 side, he played a lot of cricket against Afghanistan U19. At that time – 2015, 2016 – Mujeeb-ur-Rahman, Rashid Khan, all of those guys were playing U19 cricket.
“So he was just telling me that these guys bowl the googly a little differently from the rest of the leg-spinners in the world. They bowl only with three fingers: the thumb, the middle finger and the index finger.
“I tried to copy that grip, and with a few months of just repeating that grip again and again, it kind of just stuck, and that's how I've been bowling my googly since then, till now.”
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That googly became his calling card over the course of the Maharaja Trophy, accounting for 12 of his 23 wickets – for right-handers, it helped him constantly keep the stumps in play, and left-handers often found themselves slicing across the line, to a ball going away from them.
Because of his height, Yash has a natural tendency to bowl with a flattish trajectory, and extract extra bounce. But he does have the ability to toss it up in more classical fashion as well. That tendency, as well as his bowling action which has changed since 2023, are reminiscent of a senior India leggie – with whom he has spent time at close quarters.
“For leg spin, I'd say my biggest role model is Anil Kumble. And Yuzi Chahal as well. For the one year that he was with RR at the same time I was, he was quite helpful in the nets.
“[He’s a] very friendly, jolly guy. So I used the opportunity to talk to him whenever I could. He talked to me about pace variation, and not being afraid to give the ball a little air, regardless of who the batsman is. So I feel like this Maharaja [season] as well, I used some of his tips as best I could.”
More generally as well, Yash values the opportunity that being in and around the RR squad has given him: “They take care of us very well. They make sure they treat us (net bowlers) similar to [main squad] players, if not the same. Whatever the players need; recovery, etc, we get the same thing. So in that sense, the life of a net bowler is pretty good.
“From where I started off in 2023 in India, having looked up to all these guys like Sanju [Samson] and [Yashasvi] Jaiswal, to bowling to them in the nets on a daily basis, that definitely changes you as a player – it makes you learn a lot of things.
“And I’d definitely say, a large contribution to my performance in Maharaja is due to all the camps I've attended with RR. That's helped me learn a lot about the T20 format, and what to bowl to which kind of batsman.”
In one sense, Yash is walking much the same path that his brother did. Yodhin attended a trial with RCB in March 2017, but suffered a knee injury off his very first delivery, which kept him out of the entire season. The following year, he spoke about playing in the Karnataka Premier League (the earlier version of the Maharaja Trophy) to get back up to speed.
Between his time in the RR nets, and his outstanding season with Hubli, Yash has gone a step ahead. International cricket is still far away, but in all fairness, there’s enough time at hand for the 19-year old.
He is not heaping pressure upon himself in that respect. “I feel the goal is always to, you know, level up… try to play the next level. And with IPL as well, it's a long way to go. So whatever happens, happens for the best. I'm not really targeting anything.”
The way he tells the story about his “surreal” meeting with Bishop, it was the senior man who noticed him and wanted to know more: “He approached me at the Chennai airport just asking me how tall I was. Then he saw that I was wearing the RR travel jersey as well.
“He just went into depth asking me questions about where I'm from, what I bowl. So we had a short conversation there, and we just took the picture and he wished me luck.”
At Yash’s next celebrity encounter, perhaps no such questions will be needed.
Image credit: X.com / Ian Bishop, Instagram / Hubli Tigers
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