In 2016, when Haseeb Hameed had just made a Test debut hailed as one of the most assured in England's history, you'd have been met with shocked faces if you said he'd only have played 10 Tests in total, without a century, nine years later.
Equally, six years ago, when he'd been dropped by his boyhood club having averaged 9.44 in the previous season, if you’d told him he’d be captaining the side at the top of the County Championship as the competition’s leading run-scorer, he might have been even more surprised.
Nottinghamshire’s turnaround this year is similarly drastic to Hameed’s over the last three. They finished one place off relegation last season, and are now years on from having realistically challenged for red-ball silverware. With Surrey’s golden generation gunning for four in a row, and the chasing pack seemingly a level just out of reach, few would have predicted Nottinghamshire would compete at the top in 2025. However, at the end of the May break they had won six out of seven, and were nine points ahead of Surrey at the top. Ironically, the match they lost – against Durham at Chester-le-Street – was Hameed’s most notable.
On a batting friendly pitch (so much so that there were 10 fifty-plus scores registered in the game, three of them centuries) Hameed outshone them all. He carried his bat in Nottinghamshire’s first innings, in which the rest of the batting order collapsed around him, reaching a double century with a six as he outraced Mohammad Abbas’s clearly finite time at the other end. He finished not out on 206, which came at a rate a tick above 85, a far cry from those who remember his resistance almost a decade ago in India, where he was thrown in as a teenager and held out for 144 balls in the second Test for just 25 runs.
“I think it’s just natural evolution and me developing as a player,” says Hameed of the double against Durham. “For that knock in particular, I didn’t make a conscious decision to go out and score at a certain rate. All I was thinking about was trying to contribute to the team and playing what the situation in front of me was, which was very different at the start and end of the day.”
682 runs
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) May 17, 2025
3 fifties
1 hundred
1 double ton
Haseeb Hameed, who last played for England in 2022, is in sensational form 💪#CountyChampionship pic.twitter.com/BoyZXJA9qh
While Hameed may not see it as a conscious development, there are other signs of a shift in his game. The innings he played against Sussex three weeks before the match against Durham was similarly punchy. He hit 85 off 122 balls again amidst a collapse, and on a pitch Sussex had just been bowled out for 169 on.
“I’m just trying to constantly improve,” says Hameed. “I’m more experienced now. I’m 28 years old, I’ve played over 100 first-class games, so I have a bank of experience behind me, both in terms of highs and lows. They all shape you and develop you as a person and a player. You naturally come to accept everything a bit more.
“In the game that we play, there are so many ups and downs, so many variables and I think you come to work with that rather than trying to fight it.”
The story of Hameed’s early ups and downs is well known: The Test call-up as a teenager, the praise from some of the most notable figures in the game and a promised golden future, and then the tough times that followed – club-less at 22 despite still being regarded as one of the naturally talented young opening batters in the country, and the desperate fight to avoid being consigned to a great ‘what-if?’ pile.
But, having been thrown a lifeline by Notts at the end of 2019 and having worked extensively with Peter Moores over the year that followed, he began to take the first step on the long journey back to the top. After making runs in the early part of the 2021 County Championship and a century – again in Durham – for a County Select XI in a warm-up game for that summer’s Test series against India, he found himself once again fast-tracked into an England side desperate for top-order runs.
There was no fairy-tale return though. Hameed made 0 and 9 when he came into the XI for the second Test, but the half-centuries he scored later in the series were enough to see him on the plane to Australia later in the year, for a tour blighted by Covid restrictions that none of its non-Australian participants will likely look back on with any fondness.
“That period was challenging for everyone involved,” says Hameed. “We had lockdowns, bubbles, it wasn’t an easy period in any cricketer’s life. Things you take for granted like going out for a meal, you worried about in case you came into contact with someone who had Covid. Being able to see family at any opportunity, or having them with you, is a very important thing. That period in itself was extremely challenging.”
Four years later, having been dropped after four consecutive single digit scores on that tour, Hameed is in the runs once again. While it’s clear his England ambitions still remain central to his career, perhaps this is the first time they haven’t consumed it. England have a stacked top seven, and Hameed is still realistically several pegs down their list of potential replacement top-order batters.
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“I’m 28, I’m entering my prime,” says Hameed. “Hopefully a lot of those years can be in an England shirt… The only thing I know is a batsman’s currency is runs. You need to give yourself the best opportunity to do that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to put pressure on myself, or anyone else, to do that. I’m just really enjoying playing for Notts right now.
“I’ve still got ambitions to play for England. As I’ve always said, I’ll have those ambitions for as long as I’m playing. That will never change.”
A half-century against Yorkshire on the first morning of the County Championship resumption this week moved Hameed even further clear at the top of the run-scoring charts. While currently rich in the currency that he values, the fruition of his future ambitions likely relies on supplements to those riches, maturing into the next phase of his career rather than channeling that teenager in Ranchi.
But, for now, it’s enough to have found an equilibrium, to be leading the best side in the country from the front, and that a player billed as a great talent of the English game hasn’t been lost to the expectations placed on him as a 19-year-old. The grit it’s taken on and off the pitch to keep going, is testament enough to a player deserving of the rewards he’s reaping.
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