“We took a wrong turn one day when my father and I were going to buy my fourth-standard school books,” Harsh Dubey told The Indian Express. “I came across cricket practice at Ruby Club and asked my father what it was. He explained that’s where cricketers were made, and I got hooked.” That wrong turn was in Nagpur, 2010. Dubey was nine. On Monday, he was named in India’s Test and ODI squads for the series against Afghanistan – the destination that wrong turn pointed toward all along. The path there was built on sacrifice that was not always his own. His father worked with the CISF, a transferable job that kept uprooting the family. When Harsh was deep into his age-group cricket, the transfers grew distant. “He decided to quit the force for my career,” Dubey says. His mother, a teacher, was up at five every morning, packed his lunch, left for school before he returned from training. “I have seen how much my parents sacrificed their personal lives for me,” he says. “When I do well, the happiness I see in them – that is the biggest thing for me.” When Sunrisers Hyderabad called him up as a replacement in IPL 2025, he got Mitchell Marsh on debut. Before the next game against RCB, he rang his father. “Papa, I am going to take Virat’s wicket,” he said. His mother told CricketNext what happens before every big match. “He thinks about who he wants to get out. He prepares himself for it mentally.” His father told CricketNext the rest. “He had been watching Virat for so long. And the biggest thing about him is he doesn’t think – Virat Kohli is batting in front of me, or Russell is batting. Honestly, that is the biggest key to success.” Kohli was caught at cover for 43. Seventh over. Dubey pumping his fist. Afterward he got Kohli’s autograph on his cap. “I’ve watched him since my childhood,” he wrote on Instagram. “Getting his wicket is truly a dream come true.” His father told CricketNext about the boy they first brought to Ruby Club. The senior left-arm spinner at the club fell ill one day and Harsh got a game by accident. He took eight wickets and made sixty-plus runs as an opener. He also recalled the boy coming off the field once, run out without facing a ball as a non-striker, his face red, crying so hard neither parent could hold back. “That thing I remember even today,” his father said. He also remembered the bats – broken every ten days from sheer use. “He was that mad about batting.” That batting madness showed itself most vividly in the Hyderabad group game this Ranji season. Vidarbha were 70 for 7 when Dubey walked in. He took them to 180. Both innings he made fifties, picked up eight wickets. “That match was my best of the season,” he says. More than that, though, was the Ranji final, where – with Vidarbha’s first-innings lead at stake – he bowled the last ten overs with a cut finger bleeding through his glove. “I have the video,” he says. He bowled anyway. Vidarbha won. The 69 wickets in 10 matches placed him alongside Bishan Singh Bedi, Jaydev Unadkat and Dodda Ganesh in an elite list of single-season Ranji hauls. Across 27 first-class games, he has 133 wickets at an average of 23 and 1026 runs at 25.Story continues below this ad Anil Kumble, watching him bowl for SRH, told ESPNcricinfo’s Time Out what he saw. “He gives it a proper tweak – that is the start. When you do that, you get drift, and more importantly it goes off the surface that much quicker.” Tom Moody, alongside Kumble on the same show, added: “When he changes his pace, he doesn’t lose the integrity of the shape of the ball. A lot of spinners under pressure just produce a quicker ball that disappears. His arrival always has a really nice shape and dip with the change of pace.” Moody concluded: “I see him as a Test bowler as much as a T20 bowler. Imagine facing this guy on a turning track.” R Ashwin had been watching earlier. He called Dubey to play the TNCA league in Chennai during the off-season. When Dubey first arrived, Ashwin kept it simple. “He told me – your ball is coming out well, don’t change anything. If there’s a problem we’ll look at it then. Just let it run,” Dubey says. Last season he had been desperate – anxious to hold his place, over-trying, bowling into the batsman’s arc. “I realised I was too desperate to take wickets,” he says. This season, with Aditya Sarwate moving to Kerala and his own place in the side secure, the desperation left. “I just did what I have always done – bowl in the right areas, contribute with the bat lower down. I didn’t complicate it.”
Harsh Dubey, the spinner who once predicted Kohli’s wicket, named in India squads
