Playing Test cricket for your national team is the greatest achievement any cricketer can attain. It is the pinnacle of the sport, to receive a cap and be able to represent your country in whites, and one which those who reach that stage spend countless years of effort working towards. However, sometimes that isn’t enough. Players of the highest quality have put in the work for years and years on the domestic circuit, but for a variety of reasons never earned that final call-up. It is one of the most heartbreaking things in cricket, in equal measure to how special it must be to finally earn a cap.
In the wake of domestic performances from the likes of Abhimanyu Easwaran and Sarfaraz Khan being overlooked for the tour to West Indies, here are five players who made a name for themselves in India's domestic tournaments, piling up the runs or wickets and doing as well as any in the national team, but unfortunately never getting the elusive India cap.
1 Amol Muzumdar
Perhaps the first name many people think of when asked this question, Muzumdar is maybe the most talented batter who consistently put in the work but never got his just rewards, if only purely because of the quality present ahead of him. In a career spanning nearly 20 years, Muzumdar scored over 11,000 first-class runs at an average of 48, racking up 30 centuries. Of all batters never to have played for India, he tops the list in runs — as good as he was, he faced an uphill battle throughout his career to crack into a middle order which had made the Indian red-ball team a batting powerhouse.
2 Rajinder Goel
Perhaps just as fearsome a lineup to break into as that middle order of the 1990s and 2000s was the famous four-headed spin machine of Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, S Venkataraghavan, and Bhagwat Chandrashekar. With the tried-and-tested formula of the spin quarter right in front of them, there would have been more than a handful of spinners in the 60s and 70s who missed out on Test caps they might have earned in any other generation.
Haryana's Rajinder Goel is perhaps the pick of Indian bowlers to never get a cap, taking 750 First-Class wickets at an average of 18.58, bowling at an economy of 2.10. He had a remarkable ability to keep it tight as well as take wickets, with 18 10-wicket matches — but never quite enough to establish himself in the famous quartet.
3 Padmakar Shivalkar
In the same group as Goel is another left-arm orthodox bowler who averaged below 20 in that era, Mumbai's (formerly Bombay) Padmakar Shivalkar. The office perhaps makes it into the conversation not just because of his exemplary skill and accuracy, but the longevity of his career, which lasted well over 20 years. His numbers are eerily similar to Goel's, with an average of 19.69 across that incredibly long career, and an economy rate just a touch above two. He was met by the same roadblocks as Goel, but it goes to show the remarkable depth of Indian spin bowling in that era, and how all 6 players can be considered true greats of the Indian game.
4 KP Bhaskar
Krishnan Bhaskar Pillai always seemed to be on the outskirts of the Indian squad on the back of his quality performances in the Ranji Trophy, but he never quite cracked the team to make it into the lineup. Bhaskar played 95 games for Delhi in First Class cricket, and averaged over 52 — the sort of territory that otherwise is good enough for players to earn a shot at Test cricket, but never quite for Bhaskar. He ended his career with over 5400 runs and 18 centuries, an elegant and productive batter in the 1980s, who played alongside the country's future greats but never quite reached that stage himself.
5 Ranadeb Bose
Ranadeb Bose scalped 57 wickets for Bengal in the 2006-07 season, which was good for second-most by a pacer at the time. It was good enough for him to earn a call-up as member of the touring party to England that summer, but wasn't utilized in any of the matches. He wouldn’t get any closer than that, with the argument given that he didn’t have the sort of express pace that mattered internationally. Nevertheless, 317 Ranji wickets at 25.80 and a sub-25 average in List A matches to boot shows that Bose is perhaps the finest pacer never to get a cap for a country which is always on the lookout for high-quality speedsters.
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