AND Sold: Aquib Nabi Dar and his future
The hammer fell at 11:17 AM on Day 1 of the IPL 2026 auction. The room Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, UAE hummed with the tension that only comes when young lives are reduced to bid increments. “Aquib Nabi Dar: sold to the Delhi Capitals for 8.40 crore rupees.” For a 29-year bowler from a small village outside Baramulla, in north Kashmir, that number was not just a price tag. It was a threshold. One moment, he was the kid who had walked three kilometres every day to practice on a dust patch with a cracked leather ball, his shoes caked in mud, his hands calloused from bowling 20 overs before school. The next, he was a trending topic on Twitter, a headline in every sports portal, and the subject of a thousand hot takes from armchair experts who had never watched him bowl a full spell in the Jammu & Kashmir.
In that instant, Aquib was sold twice. Once to a franchise. The second time: to the noise.
That is the loud opportunity and the quiet tragedy of Indian cricket talent today. The auction does not just transfer a player’s contract; it transfers his attention, his peace of mind, and the weight of a million unasked-for aspirations to a public sphere that has forgotten how to be patient with potential.
For Aquib, the stakes are even higher. He is not just another young bowler. He is the latest face of Kashmir’s long, quiet struggle to be seen in Indian cricket not as a symbol, but as a player. Every wicket he takes will be hailed as “a victory for Kashmir”; every over he concedes will be dismissed as “proof he was overhyped”. For him, success will not be measured by wickets alone. It will be measured by his ability to stay Aquib—before the auction, before the tweets, before the cameras—while playing at the highest level.
The task of making that possible does not fall to Aquib. It falls to the people who now manage his career. Not the agents pitching energy drink endorsements, or the PR teams drafting generic social media posts. But a small, trusted circle that understands one simple truth: for a deserving talent, the best management is not about maximizing exposure. It is about minimizing distraction.
Let us start with the most corrosive source of noise: social media. In the first 48 hours after the auction, Aquib’s social media following would have jumped from 100s to 1,000. Soon to lakhs. His X might go from a handful of messages from friends to 3,000 an hour—half praise, a quarter neutral curiosity, and a handful venom. “How did a man from Baramulla get picked over a veteran?” “Wait till he chokes in the IPL. All hype, no skill.”
The standard management response is to advise a player to “ignore the trolls”. But for a 29-year-old who has never been in the public eye, ignoring the noise is not a skill—it is an impossibility.
The human brain is wired to fixate on negative feedback: one troll tweet will stick in his mind longer than 100 positive ones. The first rule for Aquib’s management, then, is non-negotiable: take away the keys. For the first six months of his IPL stint, Aquib should not have direct access to his social media accounts. Not because he is incapable of handling them, but because he does not need to.
His team should assign one trusted person—preferably someone who knows him from his early days, not a Mumbai-based PR executive—to curate his online presence. This person will post only essential updates: a photo from a practice session, a brief thank-you note after a match.
They will not engage with trolls. Most importantly, they will not show Aquib the negative comments. Instead, every week, his bowling coach and a sports psychologist will sit with him and review only constructive feedback: data from the franchise’s analytics team on release point consistency, notes on how to vary his pace against left-handed batters, footage of where he can tighten his line. This is not about creating a bubble. It is about creating a buffer: shielding Aquib from noise that does not make him a better player.
But a buffer against social media is not enough. For Aquib, the weight of expectation is not just online—it is personal. Every time he goes home, there will be relatives at the door, neighbours asking for selfies, local politicians wanting to pose with him. The temptation for management is to move him to a metro city, put him in a fancy apartment, and insulate him from his roots. That would be a catastrophic mistake.
Rootedness is the best armour against the limelight. Aquib’s management should not uproot him; they should anchor him to the things that made him a cricketer in the first place.
They should schedule regular trips back to valley of Kashmir—once every two months, even if only for three days—where he can bowl on the same dust patch, help his old coach repair the nets, and play with the boys who used to laugh at him for being too small to bowl fast.
Last year, Yashasvi Jaiswal’s team made sure he spent a week every month at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan, where he had slept on the pavements as a homeless teenager. Jaiswal later said those trips kept him grounded: “When I bowl there, I remember I didn’t start playing to be rich. I started playing because I loved it.” For Aquib, those trips back would serve the same purpose.
Another critical pillar of management should be the creation of a “non-cricket ritual”: a daily practice that has nothing to do with bowling, fitness, or matches. For Aquib, this could be tending to a small patch of saplings in the franchise’s residential complex—something he learned from his grandfather, who tended an orchard back home for 40 years. Every evening, for one hour, Aquib would water the saplings, prune the branches, and sit with them in silence. In that hour, he is not Aquib Nabi Dar, the IPL bowler. He is just Aquib: the boy who helped his grandfather pick apples every autumn, who learned patience not from a coach, but from waiting for fruit to ripen.
Sports psychologists have long emphasized the value of such rituals. When a player’s entire identity is tied to performance, a bad match can feel like a personal failure. A non-cricket ritual creates a separate sphere of identity—one not dependent on wickets or runs. It reminds the player that they are more than their sport.
There will be moments, however, when the noise is too loud to ignore: when Aquib is not just trolled, but misrepresented. Last year, a young cricketer from Jammu & Kashmir was subjected to online abuse after being photographed with a relative who had political ties. The story was twisted to question his loyalty. For Aquib, a similar controversy could arise at any time.
In such moments, the worst thing his management could do is let him respond on social media. A heated tweet would only escalate the controversy, turning Aquib into a symbol rather than a player. The best response is selective, dignified, and brief. His team should arrange for a single interview with a trusted journalist—someone who understands cricket and will not ask him to defend his identity. In that interview, Aquib would not engage with the controversy. He would say: “I work 12 hours a day to be a better bowler. That is all I care about.” Then, he would return to practice the next day, as if nothing happened. The goal is not to win the argument. It is to refuse to play the game.
Critics will argue this is coddling. But this misunderstands pressure. The pressure of bowling to a world-class batsman in the final over of an IPL match is the kind that makes a player better. The pressure of reading a tweet that says “you don’t belong here” is not. The job of management is to separate the two.
When the hammer fell at the auction, Aquib Nabi Dar was sold. But “sold” does not have to mean “lost”. It can mean “entrusted”: to a team that understands talent is fragile, attention is a poison if unmeasured, and success is not about how much you earn, but how long you keep playing the game you love.
The question is not: will Aquib manage that? It is: will his management let him?
Ajaz Rashid is a social and development entrepreneur.
