Only 15 months after inheriting India’s T20 captaincy, Suryakumar Yadav has helped build a halo of fearlessness around his team of young cricketers — more so, after India won the Asia Cup in Dubai last month after beating Pakistan in three politically charged encounters, including the final.
His captaincy record in the shortest format is phenomenal with India having won 23 of 29 games for a win percentage of 82.75 per cent, the best among all Indian captains.
On Friday, Suryakumar will be the guest at the Express Adda in his hometown Mumbai. He will be in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group, and Devendra Pandey, Deputy Associate Editor, The Indian Express.
More than tactical acumen, team-management or the effortless execution of a high-pressure job, Suryakumar’s biggest legacy in Indian cricket is how he revolutionised the team’s T20 batting.
Before he remoulded himself from an conventional red-ball batsman to a T20 great, India’s batting was steeped in semi-orthodox ideals, playing the format like an abbreviated 50-over game, averse to the pyrotechnics and improvisations showcased by the best teams in the world.
Suryakumar furnished the team with a new template, making him not only India’s greatest T20 batsman but also the most important one. Among a group of neo-classicists like Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, he emerged as India’s first post-modern T20 batsman, who lapped and scooped, reverse-swept and slog-swept.
His is an inspiring story — a man of lesser ambition and purpose would have given up the dream of representing the country and be satisfied turning up for Mumbai on the domestic field. But Suryakumar recalibrated his game, fought, strove and realised his dream of putting on the India colours in 2021, when was 31.
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Three years later, he became the captain, and is now shepherding the team through India’s golden age in T20 cricket. The T20 World Cup defence next year could well be the icing on the cake.
The Express Adda is a series of informal interactions organised by The Indian Express Group and features those at the centre of change.
Previous guests include External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, philanthropist Bill Gates, Union Housing and Urban Affairs and Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, and motivational strategist Gaur Gopal Das.
The list also includes several sports personalities, such as cricket icons Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma, chess legend Viswanathan Anand, and Olympic gold-medallist javelin thrower Neeraj Chopra.
