3 min readMumbaiMar 26, 2026 09:24 AM IST
When Yuvraj Singh landed at the airport after the 2014 T20 World Cup final loss to Sri Lanka, he was abused. Soon, stones were thrown at his home. “I felt like I was a villain, a culprit, like somebody had shot somebody and was going to jail. I still remember how I felt in that moment,” he would recall years later.
A close game was lost. Yuvraj, Virat Kohli, and MS Dhoni couldn’t finish. The reason was a delivery.
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Lasith Malinga kept firing yorkers well outside off stump. Yuvraj kept toe-ending them. Then came Nuwan Kulasekara, who came closest to the modern avatar of that ball. His deliveries skimmed the wide line, especially after he took out Yuvraj with a wide full toss that sank into long-off’s palms. He began pinging that line to Kohli and Dhoni. Both tried to reach out and drag it to the on-side. Neither could. When they sliced it, a deep backward point and third man ensured there was just a single in it.
The visuals stay with you. Kohli banging his bat into the turf. Dhoni slipping and falling trying to drag a ball from way outside off. Two of the finest finishers in the game defeated not by pace or swing, but by width.
It’s difficult to say if that was the birth of the well-outside-off yorker. But it was certainly its prime-time debut.
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A few years later, the delivery began rearing its head in the IPL. From 2021, it took centre stage. Dwayne Bravo made it his own, punctuating his bewilderingly dipping slower balls with these wide yorkers. The rest began to catch up.
Bhuvneshwar Kumar had 13 runs to defend in a final over against AB de Villiers. With 12 needed from four and AB on strike, Bhuvneshwar kept firing them wide. The fourth ball, he came straighter — smashed for six. The other three were all wide, all three dot balls.
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That same year, Andre Russell made it his signature ball, with a twist — he delivered it from around the stumps. In one memorable over, he tied down Kieron Pollard with it, then eventually got his man, edging after attempting a wild shot, having walked across his stumps. Russell had tried it in earlier seasons, but not with this consistency. The youngsters followed. Kartik Tyagi and Arshdeep Singh, who stopped a rampaging Sanju Samson that year with this delivery. “The field was set, and the plan was to feed him wide yorkers. If we could execute it all six balls.” Arshdeep has kept his love affair with that ball since.
The sweet irony arrived when Russell, who had almost made the wide yorker his own, found himself thwarted by it. He would keep flinging his bat, but often couldn’t put them away. Sometimes a delivery finds its way back to the man who made it famous.
