Noor Ahmad Out-Bowls Rashid Khan in the IPL

Between the 2023 and 2026 seasons, four bowlers took at least fifty wickets in the Indian Premier League while conceding fewer than eight and a half runs an over. Noor Ahmad is one of them, with the second-best bowling average in that group. The bowler he beats, by more than four and a half runs per wicket, is Rashid Khan — his compatriot, his predecessor at Gujarat Titans, and the man generally accepted as the finest Twenty20 spinner of the era.

That is not a claim that Noor is better than Rashid. It is a claim about something more interesting: that Afghanistan has produced a second wrist-spinner of genuine franchise quality, that the two of them turn the ball in opposite directions, and that the younger one's international record — twenty Twenty20 international wickets at nearly thirty — badly understates what he can do, in large part because the older one has been standing in front of him for a decade.

What a left-arm wrist-spinner actually does

Noor Ahmad Lakanwal was born in Khost in January 2005 and bowls left-arm unorthodox spin: wrist spin from the left hand, which turns away from a right-handed batter and into a left-hander. It is the rarest bowling type in professional cricket, and the scarcity is the point. A right-handed batter facing an orthodox left-arm spinner sees the ball come in to him; facing a leg-spinner, he sees it leave. Facing Noor, he sees it leave — but delivered from the other side of the wicket, at a different angle, with a googly that comes back in. Almost nobody in world cricket has practised against it.

His career arrived absurdly early. He signed for Melbourne Renegades in the Big Bash League in December 2020, aged fifteen, which made him the youngest player in that competition's history. He made his Twenty20 international debut against Zimbabwe at seventeen and played in the 2023 World Cup at eighteen. By the time he reached the IPL he had years of senior franchise cricket behind him and was still a teenager.

The IPL record

The full career figures, computed from the open ball-by-ball archive, read 51 matches, 1,098 deliveries, 61 wickets, an economy rate of 8.17 and an average of 24.51 across four seasons. Set against the high-volume spinners of the same period, the average is the standout: better than Rashid Khan, better than Yuzvendra Chahal, better than Kuldeep Yadav, and behind only Varun Chakravarthy among bowlers with fifty or more wickets since 2023.

The season-by-season progression shows a bowler still finding a level rather than one who has settled:

Season	Franchise	Matches	Wickets	Economy	Average
2023	Gujarat Titans	13	16	7.82	23.06
2024	Gujarat Titans	10	8	8.33	36.25
2025	Chennai Super Kings	14	24	8.16	17.00
2026	Chennai Super Kings	14	13	8.39	32.92

The 2025 column is the peak, and it was a genuinely outstanding season. Twenty-four wickets in fourteen matches at seventeen apiece made him Chennai Super Kings' leading wicket-taker and second in the whole competition, and he did it as the front-line spinner in an attack that also contained Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin — two bowlers with more than a thousand international wickets between them, both of whom took fewer. His debut for the franchise, in March at Chepauk, produced four for eighteen against Mumbai Indians.

The alternating pattern of that table is worth acknowledging rather than smoothing over. His good seasons are excellent and his ordinary ones are ordinary, and 2024 and 2026 both produced averages in the thirties. A four-season record with that much variance is not yet the record of an established great; it is the record of a young bowler whose method works overwhelmingly when the conditions and the plans align.

Where the wickets come from

The phase split is unusually clean. He has bowled 887 of his 1,098 career deliveries in the middle overs and taken 46 of his 61 wickets there, at 8.08 an over and a strike rate of one every 19.3 balls. That is the classic attacking-spinner assignment: overs seven to fifteen, no protection from the field restrictions, told to take wickets rather than save runs.

What is less usual is the death-overs work. He has bowled 151 deliveries in the last five overs and taken thirteen wickets at 8.26 an over — a better economy rate there than in his main phase, with 40 per cent of those deliveries producing no run at all. Captains do not usually give a wrist-spinner the eighteenth over. MS Dhoni and the Chennai management have done it repeatedly, and it has worked.

The dismissal types confirm the wicket-taking method: twelve bowled, seven stumped and three leg before out of 61, which is nineteen dismissals where the batter never made contact worth speaking of. His most frequent victims are Nicholas Pooran and Rinku Singh, three each — both left-handers, both power hitters, and both facing a ball spinning into them from a bowler they see rarely.

The international problem

Against all of that, the Afghanistan record is modest. Roughly two dozen Twenty20 internationals have produced twenty wickets at close to thirty, and thirteen one-day internationals have produced ten at over sixty. Those are the numbers of a squad bowler, not a spearhead.

Part of the explanation is straightforward selection. Afghanistan's spin attack has been built for years around Rashid Khan, with Mujeeb Ur Rahman and others competing for the remaining places, and a side does not usually play three wrist-spinners. Noor has spent his international career being the third or fourth option in the one discipline his country has in surplus, which means short spells, defensive assignments and long gaps between matches. A middle-overs attacking spinner given two overs at a time in the wrong phase will not produce IPL numbers.

Part of it is also simply that he is twenty-one. The international record is small enough that a single good series would move it substantially, and the franchise record suggests he has the method to do exactly that. He has played in the 2023 fifty-over World Cup and in T20 World Cups since, so the opportunity is not being withheld.

But the gap between the two records is real and worth stating plainly rather than explaining away. On the evidence to date, Noor Ahmad is one of the best short-format spinners in franchise cricket and has not yet been one of the best in international cricket. Which of those two facts turns out to be the durable one is the open question of his career.

Why the IPL noticed first

There is a structural reason the franchise game found him before the international game did, and it applies to more than one Afghan bowler. The IPL auction rewards a specific, scarce, match-winning skill and does not much care about the length of a player's record. A left-arm wrist-spinner who takes wickets in the middle overs is exactly the asset a franchise will pay heavily for, because there is no substitute available and because the eight-week format means a bowler only has to be good for a short concentrated burst.

International selection works differently. It rewards incumbency, format flexibility and fitting into an existing plan, and Afghanistan already had a plan. So the same bowler is a first-choice ten-crore signing in one competition and a rotation option in the other, on the same skill, at the same age.

Anyone following the league's leading wicket-takers will find Noor a long way down a list dominated by bowlers with fifteen-year careers. He has had four seasons and is younger than most of the players below him. The record so far argues he will be climbing it for a while.

Sources and method

The IPL match, wicket, economy, average, season, phase and dismissal-type figures here were computed from the open ball-by-ball archive, which covers every IPL season to date; phase splits use overs 1-6, 7-15 and 16-20. The comparison of bowling averages across the 2023 to 2026 seasons was computed over the same archive and is restricted to bowlers with at least fifty wickets in that window. His international appearance and wicket figures are published career records and are not computed here: the archive holds no Afghanistan international matches at all, so nothing in this piece about his Afghanistan career is derived from ball-by-ball data. Biographical detail — the Khost birthplace, the Big Bash signing at fifteen, the debut dates and the Chennai purchase — is descriptive.