🇮🇳 Mohammed Siraj

Mohammed Siraj was born on 13 March 1994 in Hyderabad, the second son of Mohammed Ghouse, an auto-rickshaw driver who worked twelve-hour shifts in the city's old quarter, and Shabana Begum, a homemaker. The family lived in a two-room rented flat in Toli Chowki. Siraj played, as a teenager, with a tennis ball — the leather ball cost more than the family could justify. His introduction to leather-ball cricket came in his late teens through a coach named Saleem at the Charminar Cricket Club, who provided him equipment on credit. Siraj would, for the next four years, repay him by playing every league game Saleem entered him in, often without being paid.

He made the Hyderabad Ranji squad in 2015 — his father borrowed the train fare from a neighbour. His domestic figures across the 2016–17 season — 41 wickets in 9 matches, the second-highest in the country — earned him a Sunrisers Hyderabad IPL contract and, soon afterwards, an India T20 cap. On 7 November 2020, four days before he was due to fly to Australia for India's Test tour, his father died of a lung condition. Siraj was on a plane the next morning anyway; the BCCI had offered to fly him home. He had declined. 'My father wanted to see me play Test cricket for India,' he told the press at Sydney airport. 'I will do it in his memory.'

He made his Test debut at the MCG in December 2020 and took 3 wickets in the second innings. At Sydney he took the wickets that turned the third Test in India's favour. At Brisbane — the final Test of a series India was 1-1 in, against an Australian side that had not lost at the Gabba in 32 years — he took 5/73 in the fourth innings on a wearing fifth-day pitch and bowled India to a victory that is now studied by cricket academies as the greatest away win of the modern era. He was 26. His father, who had bought him his first pair of cricket shoes from a thrift shop on a Sunday afternoon in Toli Chowki, had been dead seven weeks. Siraj, asked at the post-match press conference about the journey, paused for a long time and said: 'I am sorry. I cannot speak.' He cried. The press, for once, did not press.

What makes Siraj a great fast bowler is a combination cricket statisticians have always argued is contradictory: high pace (he averages 141 km/h, second-fastest in India), and surgical accuracy (his hit-the-seam-twice-out-of-three average is the highest of any active fast bowler). His reverse-swing in the second half of an ODI innings is the principal reason he is, as of May 2026, the ICC No. 1 ODI bowler — a position no Indian fast bowler had ever previously occupied. His seam position at release is, according to coaching analyst Suresh Kumar, 'within 4 degrees of vertical on 91 per cent of deliveries.' The figure has no parallel in the international circuit.

He has, since 2020, been the most attached fast bowler in the Indian team to his late father's memory. Before each spell of an ODI he points to the sky. After each five-wicket haul he kneels in sajda. He is unmarried, lives with his mother in a Hyderabad apartment he bought after his first IPL contract, and has used much of his subsequent earnings to buy four auto-rickshaws for the families of drivers from his old neighbourhood, with the understanding that the profits go to schooling for the drivers' children. The arrangement is informal and self-funded; he has never publicised it. The story came out in a 2024 Times of India profile that interviewed the families.

He is, in May 2026, 32 years old. He continues to take the new ball for India in all three formats. The Asia Cup final spell — 6 wickets for 1 run in 16 balls — is, by economical-rate metric, the single most destructive spell ever bowled in a major final. The video of him after the sixth wicket falling, knelt in prayer on the Premadasa boundary, mouthing something into his folded hands, has been viewed 88 million times. Siraj would not say afterwards what he had said in the prayer. The general assumption, in Indian cricket, is that he was speaking to his father.