Ben Stokes says India’s Twenty20 supernova Suryakumar Yadav “plays some shots where you’re just sort of scratching your head sometimes”. Shane Watson reckons Yadav makes his extravagant strokeplay look “low-risk, even though what he does is high risk”.
And England’s captain Jos Buttler has arguably the toughest task in cricket right now: finding a way to limit Yadav’s output to prevent him from launching India to victory in the T20 World Cup semi-final at Adelaide Oval on Thursday.
Suryakumar Yadav in blistering form for India.Credit:Getty Images
At 32, Yadav – affectionately known as ‘SKY’, an abbreviation of his long name – has burst onto the international scene in the manner of an accelerated Mike Hussey, knowing his game intimately and slotting into India’s short-form team as though he was always destined to be there.
For Buttler, who saw plenty of Yadav before he became a fixture for India, the hallmark of his extraordinary array of shots – legitimately capable of finding boundaries in the full 360 degree range – is not the technique behind them but the attitude.
Suryakumar Yadav.Credit:YouTube / ECB
“He’s been great to watch, hasn’t he,” Buttler said. “I think he’s someone who has probably been the batter of the tournament so far in terms of the way you want to watch someone go about it.
“I think his biggest strength looks to be the amount of freedom he plays with. I think he’s obviously got all the shots, but he allows himself to play all the shots, as well. He’s got a very free mindset from what I can see.”
To India’s captain Rohit Sharma, Yadav has been the injection of fearlessness and batting range that the team needed to improve upon an underwhelming World Cup campaign last year, when he was still a very new addition to the side.
Suryakumar ‘SKY’ Yadav can find boundaries to all 360 degrees of the ground.Credit:CricInfo / Twitter
Rohit joked that Yadav’s unencumbered mindset contrasted with a love of shopping that has weighed him down somewhat more than the pressures of expectation.
“I think he’s a very – he’s the sort of guy who just doesn’t carry any baggages with him – not his suitcase,” Rohit said. “He’s got a lot of suitcases, honestly speaking. He loves his shopping. But when it comes to carrying the extra pressure, extra baggages, I don’t think he has that in him.
“You can see that when he plays. It’s not like he’s played a couple of tournaments like that. He’s been playing like that for a year now, and it shows, and you can judge the kind of character he is, and he likes to play like that.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard him talk in interviews; he likes to bat in a similar fashion where we were 10-2 or 100-2. He likes to go out and express himself, and that’s probably the reason he was in the team in the last World Cup.”
Critically for an Indian side schooled on the “let’s take it to the death” ways of Virat Kohli and MS Dhoni before him, Yadav’s boldness to attack from the first ball has brought a greater array of options to the team.
“He’s shown great maturity, as well, has taken pressure from a lot of the guys the way he plays, and it rubs off on the other side, as well, when they bat around him,” Rohit said.
“He understands he likes playing on the big ground. He hates playing on small grounds. As he told me once, he doesn’t like the smaller boundaries, smaller grounds. He can’t see the gaps. I believe that he likes to see big gaps, and that’s where his strength is.”
Suryakumar Yadav belts one down the ground against England.Credit:ECB / YouTube
The yearning for gaps is borne out by the examination of CricViz analyst Ben Jones. In terms of T20 batting impact, Yadav leads the world, not only at this tournament but over the past three years. And he does it with a perfect meld of long-form technical soundness and T20 brainstorming.
“He maintains that ability to play long innings, to deal with the traditional ‘red-ball’ threats to his wicket, but he matches it with unerring aggression, a relentless commitment to attacking intent,” Jones wrote for Wisden.
“Statistically, Suryakumar is the fastest starter in the middle overs ever in T20, arriving to the middle and getting stuck in from ball one. It’s laughable how often he hits his first ball for four. He’s two players in one.”
England captain Jos Buttler has the task of corralling Yadav.Credit:Getty Images
So how to get him out? For Buttler’s England, the consideration will be around trying to give Yadav precious few angles to play with. Width can be despatched with equal precision to the off side or the on, balls can disappear as readily over short fine leg as midwicket, and even high pace like Mark Wood’s is not insurmountable.
Intriguingly, Yadav’s quietest scoring area according to CricViz is the traditional zone just outside the top of the off stump. But a slavish commitment to that spot by the bowlers will likely bring another feat of ingenuity and more runs.
Whatever happens, Yadav has already raised the bar for T20 batting, much as AB de Villiers once did.
“To be able to do it in one or two games, that can happen. But to be able to do it so consistently in the big games?” Watson said. “He is a special talent and it doesn’t look like anything’s going to change. It looks like he’s going to be out to continue to do this for a long time.”
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