It says much about the dramatic changes within UAE cricket that Sohaib Khan now feels like one of the old stagers of the national team.
It is still only 10 weeks since he played the innings which announced him on the world stage as a player of great promise for the country. And only six months since he made an unspectacular international debut at all.
Even by the hyper-transient standards of UAE cricket, the latest changes have been at warp speed. Suddenly, a set of players who have scarcely even had time to apply for a driving license yet are available to play for the national team.
Now they have batters who are newly arrived from the Indian domestic system, like Harpreet Bhatia and Akshdeep Nath.
It means even players like Sohaib, fresh from his T20 World Cup heroics, are not assured of a place in the starting XI, let alone those who have spent their whole lives pining for a place in the national team.
Sohaib’s back-to-back 50s against Canada and Afghanistan were the UAE’s best takeaways from the World Cup.
Those innings, full of skill and composure on the biggest stage, should have inked him in as the UAE’s No 4 in both formats of the game for the foreseeable future.
And yet by the next time they played, he was down at No 6 in a UAE line-up that now had five entirely new recruits.
In the T20Is against Nepal, he made one and then a duck, and will now be sweating on his place for the Cricket World Cup League 2 tri-series games which follow.
Whether or not he does make the XI for the first game, against hosts Nepal on Saturday in Kathmandu, Sohaib says he feels transformed by his experience at the World Cup.
His brace of half-centuries in Delhi – a city he used to call home – gave him a belief that he can perform on the international stage.
“Things changed after the World Cup,” Sohaib said. “I got confidence to represent my team at the highest level.
“Thanks to the management, whether it be the coach, fielding coach, physio – they all backed me. I got to learn few things for what to do now, and how to prepare for the biggest stage.”
The thrilling 51 he made in the run-chase against Canada, setting up just the UAE’s third win ever at a World Cup, was poignant.
It came in the city where he had lived since the age of 14. Born in Bihar, near the border with Nepal, he moved to India’s capital to study, and it was there that he first harboured ambitions of playing cricket professionally.
When opportunities for cricket dried up during Covid, he relocated to Dubai instead. For the first six months he was unemployed, and he even returned to India, after giving up on the Dubai dream.
As soon as he was back, though, he got a call to return, with the promise of work in the sales department of a travel company.
With a steady income from his day job, he was able to make a name for himself in recreational cricket in the evenings, too. His journey to the national team, and ultimately the T20 World Cup, had started.
Given the hardships he had faced, his family and friends were understandably moved to see his performances at the Arun Jaitley Stadium.
The first message he opened when he got his phone back after the Canada heroics was from his elder brother, then his coach.
“There were a lot of well-wishers who contacted me through social media and my phone; it’s been a blessing for me,” he said of his World Cup experience.
“My wife was there, and I got to meet [family and friends] after all. Obviously, they were emotional because for the first time they came to watch me live.”
From that high, now he has to start again. He struggled for runs in the Emirates D50, the domestic 50-over tournament which preceded the tour of Kathmandu, and is competing in a newly packed middle order with the likes of Harpreet and Akshdeep.
But he has been written off before, with a lean run of scores after he first got his chance in the team, and did not lose faith then.
“I had nothing to lose,” Sohaib said. “Initially, in the first few games after I debuted, I didn’t get runs. But I was confident that if I play using my own skills, I'll end up scoring good runs.
“From the very first game, my mindset was to add value to the team. How can I support my team?
“No batsman can score a hundred in every match, no batsman can score 50 every time. But you have to just create an impact whether you are batting or bowling or you're fielding.”
