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Mohammad Nasir Hossain (born 30 November 1991) is a Bangladeshi cricketer from Rangpur who played for Bangladesh in all three formats between 2011 and 2018. A right-handed all-rounder — a lower-middle-order batsman, an off-spin bowler and one of the finest fielders of his generation — he played 19 Tests, 65 one-day internationals and 31 Twenty20 internationals, as recorded by ESPNCricinfo as of November 2025. In the early 2010s he was regarded as one of the most gifted young players in the country: he scored a century in each of the Test and ODI formats, was part of the side that won gold at the 2010 Asian Games and reached the 2012 Asia Cup final, and played in Bangladesh's run to the 2015 World Cup quarter-finals.
His career then unravelled in stages. A serious knee injury in 2018 ended his international career in practice; in January 2024 the International Cricket Council banned him for two years, with six months suspended, after he admitted anti-corruption charges arising from a franchise tournament in the United Arab Emirates. He returned to domestic cricket in April 2025, and in June 2026 a Dhaka court acquitted him in a long-running case over his marriage. Nasir's story is one of the most cautionary in Bangladeshi cricket: a player of genuine international class whose peak lasted barely four years.
Nasir Hossain was born on 30 November 1991 in Rangpur, in northern Bangladesh, and grew up in Bogra. He came through the age-group system quickly: at sixteen he was included in Bangladesh's squad for the 2008 Under-19 World Cup, and later that year, still a teenager, he made his first-class debut for Barisal Division. By the end of 2010 he had already collected a senior medal — he was a member of the 13-man Bangladesh squad at the Asian Games in Guangzhou in November 2010, where Bangladesh beat Afghanistan in the final to win the cricket tournament and the country's first gold medal at the Asian Games.
Nasir's first-class career began with Barisal Division in the 2008–09 season. He moved through Chittagong Division and Rajshahi Division before settling with Rangpur Division from the 2011–12 season, the divisional side of his home region, which he has represented ever since. His finest domestic innings came in December 2017, when he scored 295 for Rangpur against Barisal Division in the National Cricket League at Rajshahi — still his highest first-class score. As of November 2025, ESPNCricinfo credits him with 110 first-class matches, 6,186 runs at an average of 37.26, with eight centuries, and 97 wickets.
In franchise cricket, his market value was established early. In the auction for the inaugural Bangladesh Premier League in January 2012, the Khulna Royal Bengals bought him for US$200,000 — the highest price paid for any Bangladeshi player in that auction. He later played in the BPL for Rangpur Riders, Dhaka Dynamites, Sylhet Sixers and Chattogram Challengers, and in the Dhaka Premier Division Cricket League for leading clubs. Overseas, he was signed by the Nagenahira Nagas in Sri Lanka in 2012, and in December 2020 he was picked by the Pune Devils for the Abu Dhabi T10 League in the United Arab Emirates, where he was appointed captain — the appointment that would later sit at the centre of his anti-corruption case.
Nasir made his one-day international debut on 14 August 2011 against Zimbabwe at Harare, at the age of nineteen. Bangladesh had collapsed to 58 for 6 when he came in; he top-scored with 63 from 92 balls and lifted the total to 188 — at the time the highest score by a Bangladeshi on ODI debut. Two months later he completed a full set of debuts: his Twenty20 international debut against the West Indies at Mirpur on 11 October 2011, and his Test debut, also against the West Indies, at Chittagong on 21 October 2011. In the ODI series that followed, he made 50 off 54 balls in the second match, again arriving amid a collapse, and in the final match took his first international wickets — 2 for 3 — as the West Indies were bowled out for 61.
His defining innings came that winter. On 3 December 2011, in the second ODI against Pakistan in Dhaka, he scored his maiden international century, 100 from 134 balls, and was named player of the match even though Bangladesh lost the game. In March 2012 he was a regular member of the side that reached the final of the Asia Cup on home soil — Bangladesh's first Asia Cup final — where they lost narrowly to Pakistan. The BCB recognised his emergence with a first central contract in April 2012.
A year later he added a Test century: on 11 March 2013 he made 100 from 151 balls against Sri Lanka at Galle, and followed it days later with an unbeaten 73 from 59 balls in the one-day series at Hambantota. He remained a fixture of the one-day side through Bangladesh's strongest period of the decade, alongside contemporaries such as Shakib Al Hasan, Tamim Iqbal and Mushfiqur Rahim. He was part of the squad that reached the quarter-finals of the 2015 World Cup, and on 12 July 2015 he took his career-best ODI bowling figures, 3 for 26 against South Africa at Mirpur, helping Bangladesh beat South Africa and seal a series win.
From 2016 his place in the side became intermittent. His last T20 international came in March 2016 and his last Test in September 2017, against Australia. He played his final ODI in January 2018, against Sri Lanka. Then, in April 2018, he tore the ligament in his right knee while playing football; the injury needed an operation and kept him out of cricket for around six months. He never played for Bangladesh again.
Nasir never captained Bangladesh in international cricket — the leadership of his era belonged to others — but he was trusted with captaincy below that level, most visibly when the Pune Devils appointed him their captain for the 2021 Abu Dhabi T10 League.
As a player, his value was his versatility. With the bat he was a finisher before Bangladesh had a settled one: his early international innings, beginning with the 63 on debut, were rescue acts played from number six or seven with a freedom that earned him the nickname "the finisher" in the Bangladeshi press. He scored quickly against both pace and spin and was at his best shepherding a chase or lifting a faltering innings. His off-spin was rarely a frontline weapon — he took 24 wickets in 65 ODIs and eight in 19 Tests — but captains used him as a partnership-breaker on turning pitches. His third discipline was his most consistent: an athletic, fearless fielder, he took 34 catches in his 65 one-day internationals and saved runs in the inner ring throughout his career.
Nasir's international record, as compiled by ESPNCricinfo as of November 2025, reads: 19 Tests, 1,044 runs at an average of 34.80, with one century and six half-centuries and a top score of 100, plus eight wickets; 65 ODIs, 1,281 runs at 29.11, with one century and six half-centuries, 24 wickets with a best of 3 for 26; and 31 T20 internationals, 370 runs with a top score of 50 not out, and seven wickets. His two international centuries are themselves a small piece of Bangladeshi cricket history: he is one of a select group of Bangladeshis to have scored a hundred in both Tests and ODIs.
His honours are collective as much as individual: a gold medal at the 2010 Asian Games, where Bangladesh's cricket title was the country's first gold in Asian Games history; a runners-up medal at the 2012 Asia Cup; and a World Cup quarter-final in 2015. Individually, his 63 against Zimbabwe in August 2011 stood as the highest score by a Bangladeshi on ODI debut at the time, and his US$200,000 fee in January 2012 was the highest paid for a Bangladeshi player in the first Bangladesh Premier League auction.
The most serious episode of Nasir's career arose from the 2020–21 Abu Dhabi T10 League, where he had captained the Pune Devils. In September 2023 the ICC, acting under the Emirates Cricket Board's Anti-Corruption Code, charged him and several other people associated with the franchise, and he was provisionally suspended. He admitted three charges: failing to disclose to the designated anti-corruption official that he had received a gift worth more than US$750 — a new iPhone 12; failing to disclose full details of an approach inviting him to engage in corrupt conduct made through that phone; and failing or refusing, without compelling justification, to cooperate with the official's investigation. On 16 January 2024 the ICC announced that he was banned from all cricket for two years, with six months of the ban suspended.
A second, unrelated case ran in the civil courts. Nasir married Tamima Sultana Tammi, an airline cabin crew member, on 14 February 2021. Ten days later her former husband, Rakib Hasan, filed a case alleging that she had married Nasir without legally ending her first marriage. After a Police Bureau of Investigation report, charges were framed against the couple in January 2022 and the trial ran for more than four years. On 10 June 2026 a Dhaka court acquitted both of them of all charges: the court found, on the basis of a registered divorce deed, that Tamima had divorced Rakib in 2016 under a delegated authority he had given her, so there had been no legal bar to the marriage, and that the remaining allegations were not proven. The complainant's side indicated after the verdict that it would appeal.
Nasir served his ban away from official cricket. As part of the sanction he completed the ICC's mandatory anti-corruption education session, and the Bangladesh Cricket Board confirmed that he had fulfilled all requirements and was eligible to play official cricket again from 7 April 2025. He made his comeback on the very day his eligibility returned: on 7 April 2025 he turned out for Rupganj Tigers Cricket Club against Gazi Group Cricketers in the Dhaka Premier Division Cricket League at the Sher-e-Bangla National Stadium in Mirpur, his first competitive match in nearly nineteen months. He scored nine runs and bowled ten overs, taking 1 for 31, as Rupganj won by eight wickets.
As of late 2026 Nasir remains an active domestic cricketer in his mid-thirties, but his international career has been dormant since January 2018 and no recall has followed his return. The game has also moved on around him: the Bangladesh middle order he once anchored is now occupied by a younger generation.
Nasir grew up in Bogra and is married to Tamima Sultana Tammi; the couple's wedding in February 2021 led to the court case described above, in which both were acquitted in June 2026.
His legacy is double-edged. Between 2011 and 2015 he was, for many supporters, the most exciting young cricketer in Bangladesh — a teenager who walked in at 58 for 6 on debut and played as if the situation were normal, a centurion in two formats by the age of twenty-one, and a member of the side that delivered the country's first Asian Games gold and its first Asia Cup final. That the same career is now discussed mainly in terms of a knee injury, a corruption ban and a court case is a measure of how much of his talent went unfulfilled. His return to domestic cricket in 2025, and his acquittal in 2026, close the two chapters that defined his thirties; whether he adds anything further on the field will be decided in domestic cricket, where the finisher of 2011 now plays as a veteran.
