Mohammed Siraj was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year for 2025. Sandeep Dwivedi’s piece on Siraj originally appeared in the 2026 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
The Five Cricketers of the Year represent a tradition that dates back to 1889, making this the oldest individual award in cricket. The Five are picked by the editor, and the selection is based, primarily but not exclusively, on excellence in and/or influence on the previous English season. No one can be chosen more than once.
The delivery did not bring Mohammed Siraj one of his 23 wickets, the biggest haul of the English Test summer. In fact, it was innocuous. But it produced a touching moment, underlining his value to an Indian team in transition as they tried to avoid defeat.
The vignette began when a booming drive from Harry Brook on the second day of the fifth Test at The Oval hit Siraj’s right hand in his follow-through. Seeing him grimace, captain Shubman Gill rushed up from mid-on, then accompanied his bowler back to the top of his run-up while delicately massaging the hand that would help pen a new chapter in Indian cricket. On the final morning, that same hand – battered and bruised, and now sending down his 186th over of the series, the most on either side – delivered the knockout punch. With England on the brink of making it 3-1, Siraj speared one beneath Gus Atkinson’s attempted heave to secure a 2-2 draw.
It was the most important yorker of his career, and helped erase the memory of his dismissal in the Third Test at Lord’s, where he and Ravindra Jadeja had almost pulled off a heist, only for Shoaib Bashir to bowl Siraj with India just short. “From getting bowled at Lord’s, then reaching The Oval, it was a script from God,” he says. “When I woke up on that final morning, England needed 35 runs. I told myself that this game wouldn’t go beyond an hour, and that I will win this match.” Some read the daily horoscope to get an idea of how their day may unfold. Siraj was his own soothsayer, removing Jamie Smith and Jamie Overton before administering the coup de grace.
India had landed at Heathrow without three recently retired Test icons: Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma and Ravichandran Ashwin. They left England having discovered leaders in Gill, KL Rahul, Rishabh Pant and Jadeja. This wasn’t a surprise: they had all captained star-studded IPL teams. But the emergence of Siraj as the general of India’s pace battery was the revelation of the tour.
In the two Tests without Jasprit Bumrah, both of which India won, he delivered when the team needed him. At Edgbaston, with his side 1-0 down, Siraj constantly pestered his less experienced pace partner Akash Deep to hit the right areas. Siraj set the example with 6-70 in the first innings, including the wicket of Joe Root, plus four England players for ducks – Ben Stokes among them. Inspired, Deep took 6-99 in the second. At The Oval, Atkinson was Siraj’s fifth victim of the innings, and a career-best ninth of the match. Among Indian bowlers, only Bumrah had taken as many wickets in a series in England (spread across two summers because of Covid).
The most expressive Indian cricketer since Kohli, Siraj got along famously with England’s crowds and cricketers. Root said Siraj “faked anger” at times, since he was “too nice a guy”. Reminded of the comment, Siraj laughs: “He is a world-class batsman, and always smiling. Whenever I see him, a smile comes to my face. He is the first person on the field I see, and that makes me too calm. I decided I’m not going to look at him or talk to him.”
Instead, he hatched a plan for Root, a wobble-seam nip-backer, Exhibit A being his first-innings dismissal at The Oval. Back in 2018, while learning how to bowl outswing, Siraj had lost his stock inswinger. He tried scrambling the seam, instantly lending his bowling unexpected intrigue. “The ball would cut in sharply, and even I didn’t understand why it was behaving like that,” he says. “If I didn’t, there was no way the batsman would.” While Siraj bubbled with excitement about his new toy, the outswinger was forgotten. In 2019, his Royal Challengers Bengaluru team-mate Dale Steyn gave him a crash course. So is Siraj primarily a swing or seam bowler? He cannot be categorised, though
one thing is clear: he is a bowler with heart, who has had a tough life, but has survived and flourished.
MOHAMMED SIRAJ was born on March 13, 1994, in Hyderabad. His father was an auto-rickshaw driver, his mother a home help. The family lived in Toli Chowki, the old city’s Muslim-dominated area. In Urdu, toli means troops, chowki post: the Mughals would station their armies here. Appropriately, perhaps, the coaching staff at Gujarat Titans, his new IPL team, call Siraj “The Warrior”.
It was a future no one could have predicted when he was just one of many kids who would spend their afternoons playing tennis-ball cricket at the local Eidgah ground. His chappals – Hindi for sandals – lying pitchside, the young Siraj tore in like the wind, the rhythm of his run-up catching the attention of a cricket-crazy elder. He urged him to play for a club, but Siraj’s mother advised him to seek proper employment. Cricket’s lure, however, proved too strong.
His big break came when he was drafted in as a net bowler while the Indian team practised in Hyderabad. Never one to be intimidated by big occasions or bigger names, he tested Kohli and Rohit with bouncers. The bravado did not go unnoticed, and it helped that India’s bowling coach, Bharat Arun, was soon put in charge of Hyderabad, where he fast-tracked Siraj into the Ranji Trophy team. After a successful debut season, the IPL came calling, and so did the millions.
Having first played white-ball cricket for India in 2017/18, he made an emotional Test debut at Melbourne on Boxing Day 2020. His father had died a month earlier, but Siraj was persuaded by his mother – and by Kohli – to stay in Australia and win his first cap.
Once, during his wayward Toli Chowki days, Siraj’s mother had had enough of her cricket-mad son skipping his studies and sneaking out to Eidgah. She gave him a good thrashing. “She said I need to worry about my future,” he says. “That’s when I asked her to stop beating me, as I would one day earn so much money that there wouldn’t be any place in the house to keep it.” Then, as now, Siraj, was his own soothsayer.
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