“Mayank Yadav ek Indian player hai. Avesh Khan Indian player hai. Mohsin Khan, woh bhi India khel sakta hai. Sachin Tendulkar ka ladka Arjun bhi hai. Tera number kaise padega?”
The extended pace pack at the Lucknow Super Giants camp had rattled Ram Niwas Yadav in ways his son’s IPL contract the previous year had not. He’d counted the names aloud. He knew what each one meant.
Sitting in the corner of the living room on a rainy April afternoon, Ram Niwas holds his chai without the weight he used to carry. His cousins Surender and Vikram have settled in around him—the family punctuated by his long absences at work. “Ab khush hai,” he says quietly, as if checking the truth of it by speaking.
There had been reasons not to be. A former ASI from the Railway Protection Special Force, Ram Niwas had spent his career away from home. He knew what absence did. He knew what it meant to miss the small days. And when Prince told him, at eighteen, that he would bowl instead of taking a job—”Agar 145-150 kph main ball daalta, toh kaun mujhe rorega?”—Ram Niwas had wanted to shake him.
“I didn’t know what to do with him after school,” Ram Niwas says, setting his cup down slowly. “He had this junoon for cricket. But we were from Dariyapur Khurd. No academies. No one in the family had done it before. I couldn’t give him money to chase something that might never come. I told him, force, police, something solid. He passed the Delhi Police physical. He wouldn’t take the written exam.”
The phrase that returns to him, even now, is the one he said to Prince’s mother months ago: Tum Prince ko bigaad rahe ho. You’re ruining him by letting him play.
I didn’t know what to do with him after school,” Ram Niwas tells The Indian Express. “He had this junoon for cricket. But we were from Dariyapur Khurd. No academies. No one in the family had done it before. I couldn’t give him money to chase something that might never come.”
Santosh heard that phrase many times. She had never stopped believing. She’d watched Prince wake before dawn, cross half the city on public transport, return exhausted and go again the next morning. Her husband had the doubts. She kept count of the years.
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A young Prince Yadav with his father, Ram Niwas Yadav. (Special Arrangement)
***
Her husband would lie awake, the insomnia particular and precise. His son was twenty, twenty-one, bowling in a village while other boys his age were in uniform or climbing bureaucratic ladders. The safety Ram Niwas had built his entire life around—railway pension, government structure, the fixed thing—was slipping away. In tennis-ball cricket. In stories of three-hour journeys to coaching grounds in northwest Delhi. In a coach named Amit Vashisht who kept saying the boy had something.
Vikram had been the one to name him Prince. The first in the family to study in an English medium school, he’d wanted something different for his nephew—a name that didn’t fit the village. “While I struggled to study by travelling all that distance,” Vikram recalls, “Prince would later struggle with the game itself.”
Vashisht’s academy sat walled by jamun trees, a cosy ground where Prince bowled for hours. Despite his tennis-ball background, the coach saw it immediately—a born talent who just needed to switch mentally from rubber to leather. “His talent stood out from the start. He had all the skills up front,” Vashisht would say.
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Then came 2019. Prince had fudged his age to play Delhi U-19s. Over four years off his papers. The BCCI banned him for two years. No matches. Nothing.
“I remember thinking, Bas, iska khel khatam. His cricket is finished,” Ram Niwas says. “Why would anyone give him another chance?”
The lockdown came and swallowed those years. When Prince returned in 2023, he was a net bowler. A net bowler. Ram Niwas had spent his career watching men work their entire lives and retire with small pensions. A net bowler seemed like the ceiling now.
Prince Yadav of Lucknow Super Giants bowls against Gujarat Titans at the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium in Lucknow. (Photo by Surjeet Yadav / CREIMAS for IPL)
***
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“Then the Delhi Premier League started in 2024,” Ram Niwas says, and something shifts in his voice. “DPL. If not for that tournament, he would still be playing in the village. Khel raha hota. That was his future.”
The tournament became the doorway. Prince took thirteen wickets for Purani Dill-6—Rishabh Pant’s side. The first-ever hat-trick in DPL history was his. In November, LSG bid for him. Rs 30 lakh.
“The family was in front of the television,” Ram Niwas says. “Entire family. When the auctioneer called his name, another face came on the screen. A batter. From Ghaziabad. We thought—” He pauses. “We thought it was a mistake. Someone else’s son.”
The confusion lasted two phone calls. First, Sanjeev Goenka calling Prince directly. Then the call home.
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Vikram, sitting nearby, fills the silence: “That night, Dariyapur will not forget. The entire village knew by midnight.”
But Ram Niwas is quiet. He’s thinking about the moment before the auction. The two years of no matches. The three-hour journeys his son made alone. The scooter they didn’t have. The father who told him he was ruining him.
***
This IPL season, Prince emerged as LSG’s seam lieutenant. 11 wickets in six games. Ahead of Mohammad Shami in the franchise’s wicket-taker list.
“I was wrong,” Ram Niwas says simply. “I told him cricket would leave him with nothing. I didn’t believe the dream was possible from a village like ours.”
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Last month, Prince was called up for India A for the T20 World Cup warm-ups in February. He had to forfeit due to a knee injury. Ram Niwas knows this. He watches the trophies that line the living room wall now—a collection that didn’t exist three years ago.
“An India shirt,” he says. “That’s what I want for him now. I want him in an India shirt.”
His wife Santosh moves past him toward the kitchen. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to—she’d been saying it for years. Ram Niwas sets down his empty cup. The trophies line the wall.
