Suryakumar Yadav was conversing with students in the audience at a felicitation function near the end of the previous year. When one of them inquired about his meek return of 218 runs in 19 T20I innings in 2025, the India T20 skipper at the time gave a humorous and arrogant response.
“My 14 soldiers are covering for me… they know what will happen the day I blast.”
It was the reaction of a captain who, despite his own bat being silent, felt confident that the team was winning. Additionally, it was clear that the batter had faded into the background and the leader in him had taken over. However, performance is only that counts in the brutal world of professional sports.
Suryakumar is unlikely to add much to his record of 3,272 runs and 113 T20Is for India at 35 years and 265 days. He seemed to be living in his own world and was unaware of a protracted downturn, as evidenced by numerous quotable statements. His confidence seemed dangerously close to self-delusion at times.
The fact that Suryakumar was a superb T20 batsman and one of the pioneers who helped redefine the grammar of batting in the shortest format before passing the baton to players like Abhishek Sharma and, later, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi made the decline especially startling. He seemed to forget that he was a batter first and a captain second, though, once he was appointed captain of India’s Twenty20 team.
It sounded a little childish to say that 14 people are covering for him. He was unaware that the dressing room begins to lose respect for a captain who is not performing. It would be quite difficult for someone who hasn’t scored regularly for more than a year to genuinely give his teammates instructions on how to carry out his ideas.
What, then, ultimately led to Suryakumar’s undoing as a batter? One must return to the 2023 ODI World Cup in order to comprehend this. You’ll see a pattern: he stopped improving his game after his T20 form reached a plateau.
Then-Indian head coach Rahul Dravid stated at a World Cup press conference that Suryakumar needed to locate parts of the field other than the empty space behind the square.
The “Supla Shot” is a stroke in which Suryakumar leverages the speed of delivery to perform a shot that falls somewhere between a flick and a short-arm pull using his flexible wrists.
His international career appears to have finished in T20s as well, as the straight deliveries aimed at his body proved to be his downfall in ODIs. To the dismay of the national selector present, he even attempted to smash Arshdeep Singh behind square at the beginning of his most recent Duleep Trophy match in 2024.
Hardik Pandya was supposed to become the next captain and guide the squad in Sri Lanka after the winning Indian team returned from the Caribbean in 2024. But Gautam Gambhir, the new coach, took over. His opinions were in line with those of Ajit Agarkar, chairman of selectors, who was not too fond of the all-rounder after witnessing his performance as captain of the Mumbai Indians.
Moreover, it had a third aspect. Surya received the vote of a highly senior star who was asked for his opinion. Hardik Pandya and Suryakumar Yadav have not exactly been the greatest of friends in the dressing room for the past two years, as was well known in the inner circles of Indian cricket.
Suryakumar might have benefited from winning the Asia Cup, but in the end, it turned out to be a curse. The hostility between India and Pakistan reached a breaking point after the Pahalgam attacks and Operation Sindoor, even though India had defeated Pakistan three times throughout the competition.
Although Surya’s refusal to shake hands with his Pakistani counterpart, Salman Ali Agha, and his dedication of the victory to the Indian armed forces made him a cult figure among many Indian fans, there was another school of thought that questioned why he needed to set a contentious narrative in the first place. Was it necessary? However, Gautam Gambhir, his fiery coach, supported him.
However, his terrible performance during the competition stood out like a sore thumb. A journalist asked him, quite rightly, “Is your form a concern?” after he had scored 72 in six innings amid all the excitement, and the indifference was evident. “I am out of runs, not out of form,” was the response. The response implied that he had no desire to address the moot matter because he had never understood it.
Although Surya has been a student of Rohit Sharma, there is one significant distinction: Surya appeared to be attempting stand-up comedy, whereas the “Hit-Man” style of humor at press conferences was genuine.
Of all the ICC trophies India has won, this year’s T20 World Cup victory is the least recognized. It was inevitable to defeat the most formidable team at home. With the exception of one game against the USA, Surya failed as a batter once more, and the excitement around the trophy victory covered up his shortcomings.
The IPL ended quickly as things didn’t go as planned. Suryakumar didn’t deserve to go with a whimper after arriving with a bang.
