Six out of fifteen.
That is how many Jammu and Kashmir cricketers are in the North Zone squad for the Duleep Trophy, which starts on 23 August. A seventh number matters just as much: one. As in, one captain — and he is ours too.
BCCI has named Kanhaiya Wadhawan, J&K's wicketkeeper-batter, to lead North Zone. Five more J&K players sit under him in the squad: Qamran Iqbal, Abdul Samad, Abid Mushtaq, Sunil Kumar and Yudhvir Singh. Ayush Badoni of Delhi is vice-captain.
For a zone that has historically been a Delhi–Punjab–Haryana conversation with J&K players making up the numbers, that is a reordering, not a tweak.
The rest of the squad, for context
North Zone's remaining nine: Sanat Sangwan, Yash Dhull and Ayush Doseja from Delhi; Nishant Sindhu, Anshul Kamboj and Nikhil Kashyap from Haryana; Arshdeep Singh from Punjab; and Arjun Sharma from Services.
Look at that list and then look at the J&K six again. Punjab has one player in the squad. Jammu and Kashmir has six and the armband.
How we got here — and it was not luck
This follows directly from last season. J&K won the Ranji Trophy for the first time in their history, beating Karnataka in the final. It was the state's maiden title in a competition that has been running since the 1930s.
The standout was Auqib Nabi, who took 60 wickets — more than anyone else in the tournament — and was named Player of the Series. If his name is familiar, it is because he is on the verge of becoming J&K's first-ever Test cricketer, a story we covered earlier this month.
Selection for a zonal side is downstream of exactly that kind of season. Zone squads are picked on domestic form, and a title-winning team with the tournament's leading wicket-taker is going to be raided. What is unusual is the captaincy: leading a zone is a selectorial judgement about a player's cricket brain, not just his runs.
What the Duleep Trophy actually is
Worth spelling out, because it sits in an odd place in the calendar and plenty of people who follow cricket closely could not tell you what it decides.
It is India's zonal first-class tournament: six teams — North, South, East, West, Central and North East — drawn from the whole country, playing multi-day cricket. This edition runs from 23 August to 10 September 2026 at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. Central Zone are the defending champions.
Its real function is as a shop window. The Duleep Trophy sits early in the season and is watched closely by national selectors, because it puts players from different states into one dressing room against comparable opposition. Runs here are read differently from runs in a state game.
The zonal format also removes the excuse that a player was carried by a strong state side. In a zone team, your team-mates are the best of four or five states, the bowling you face is the best of another four or five, and there is nowhere to hide across four days. That is precisely why selectors like it — and precisely why being handed the captaincy of one is a bigger statement than a place in the squad.
Why this matters if you are not a cricket obsessive
Because it is evidence about a pathway, and pathways are the thing young players in Jammu have historically had least of.
The complaint about cricket here has never been talent. It has been that the ladder ran out — you could be the best player in your district, make the state side, and find that this was the ceiling, because the selectors' attention was elsewhere. Careers stalled at a level that was respectable and invisible.
What has changed in eighteen months is that the top of that ladder now connects to something. A Ranji title, a Player of the Series award, a J&K captain of North Zone, and a J&K bowler about to play Test cricket. Each of those is a separate piece of evidence that performing in J&K domestic cricket now gets noticed nationally.
That has a practical effect on a sixteen-year-old at a district-league ground. It changes what is worth committing to. Deciding whether to keep training seriously through a degree is a different calculation when the route above you visibly ends somewhere.
It also changes who is watching. Zonal cricket brings scouts, and a J&K-heavy North Zone means J&K's domestic circuit gets watched by people who were not watching it three years ago. That flows back down into age-group selection here.
There is a less comfortable read available too, and it is worth stating. Six players in one zone squad is a peak, not a plateau — it reflects one exceptional season, and squads move. The honest test of whether something structural has changed in J&K cricket is not this squad sheet; it is whether there are still four or five J&K names on it in two years, once the Ranji title has stopped being recent news. Nothing about this week guarantees that. It just makes it plausible for the first time.
What to actually follow
The tournament runs from 23 August at a single venue in Bengaluru, so all six squads are in one place for close to three weeks — which is why the selection meetings that follow tend to lean on it.
Watch Wadhawan's captaincy specifically. A wicketkeeper-captain makes visible decisions all day, and how he handles a zone side of players he has mostly played against rather than with is the interesting question. Samad and Yudhvir Singh are the two whose names would move fastest in a good three weeks.
And if you want the local version of this story rather than the national one, it is already playing out at home: Udhampur's Brijesh Sharma came back to play for the Ranji champions this month. The pipeline runs both directions now.
Sources: BCCI — Duleep Trophy 2026-27: All six squads revealed; 2025–26 Ranji Trophy.
