The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is going to honor Shubman Gill with the Men’s Cricketer of the Year Award. The list of BCCI Naman Awards 2026 was released on Saturday, in which Shubman Gill will receive the Men’s Cricketer of the Year and Smriti Mandhana will receive the Best Women’s International Cricketer of the Year award. This awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 15.
BCCI Naman Awards was started in 2006-07, in which the best performing cricketers in the last one year are honoured. The Best International Cricketer of the Year Award in the men’s category is also called the Polly Umrigar Award.
Shubman Gill is currently the captain of India’s Test and ODI team and this will be the second time when Gill will be honored with the Polly Umrigar Award. He scored 983 runs in 9 Test matches in the year 2025 and was the batsman who scored the most Test runs last year. During this period, he scored 754 runs in the 5-match series against England. Apart from this, he had scored 490 runs in 11 ODI matches.
On the other hand, Smriti Mandhana is going to receive the Best Female International Cricketer award for the second consecutive year and this will be the fifth time that Mandhana will be honored with this award.
Gill did not play T20 World Cup
Shubman Gill was dropped from the T20 team just before the T20 World Cup 2026. He was dropped due to poor form and he was failing to play big innings consistently in T20 since the beginning of 2025. He had to pay for this in the form of being dropped from the T20 World Cup squad. Remind that in the final of T20 World Cup 2026, India had registered a historic victory by defeating New Zealand by 96 runs.
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