Suryakumar Yadav and the T20 World Cup: The attack of the late bloomer

After years in the wings, the 32-year-old is finally living his Team India dream. It’s taken discipline, fresh tactics and an abiding love of the game, but it’s all paying off. Yadav is being called the most dangerous Indian in the ongoing World Cup.

We love precocious talent; the wunderkind who burst onto the scene as teenagers, trailing fireworks and stardust; the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Lionel Messi.

Kohli and Yadav at the end of their innings during the T20 World Cup match against the Netherlands in Australia on October 27. (AP)

But we identify with the late bloomer. Men like Suryakumar Yadav, who first played for India last year, at the age of 31, eleven years after his Ranji debut. Who has never played in Australia, yet who went into this T20 World Cup as the most dangerous player in the side.

“There is Virat (Kohli), Hardik (Pandya), Rohit (Sharma), yet you are being called the biggest threat to bowlers…” a journalist asked Yadav at the press conference after India’s win against the Netherlands.

“I’ll take that as a compliment, but I won’t comment on it,” Yadav said with a grin.

If the child prodigy’s appeal is magical and mysterious, the late bloomer’s allure is that we can see ourselves in them, and that offers us the most precious of human emotions: hope.

Theirs are typically stories of grit and perseverance, of shrugging off disappointment and sticking to their guns. By now, the thought that we should enjoy the process and not just the result is a cliché; a piece of advice that’s sound, but incredibly hard to internalise. Then along comes someone like Yadav, and you see the absolute truth of it.

In 2013, Yadav was part of India’s Under-23 Asian Cup squad. In the years that followed, he watched from the sidelines as teammates from that tournament made it to the senior level: KL Rahul, Jasprit Bumrah, Axar Patel.

There was frustration, but never a falling out of love with the game.

Yadav was known as a big-hitter with a penchant for the leg side game, yet in his first few seasons in the Indian Premier League (IPL) he met with only middling success. It was only in 2018, when he returned to Mumbai Indians (MI), his first IPL team, that a transformation began. He shed the advice he’d received all his life — keep working hard — and plotted, first with his wife, then with the MI coaches, ways to work smart.

He picked key focus areas: improving his offside strokeplay, improving his fitness, sticking to a carefully tailored diet, putting himself under pressure during nets (an example, he revealed in an interview, was to challenge himself to play certain shots on certain balls, and if he got out, to leave the nets instead of continuing).

It paid off spectacularly. He had one great season after another. Still no call-up for India though. On an October day in 2020, he smashed a 43-ball 79 for MI, in a victorious IPL campaign where he amassed 480 runs. Two days after that 79, the Indian T20 team for the tour of Australia was announced. He was not on the list.

“I couldn’t even train that day. It was difficult to take my mind off from that dejection,” he told HT then. “But never mind. I will wait for my chances.”

That chance came last year, when he finally got called up when England came visiting. His debut has a cinematic ring to it. He was having lunch with his wife at the team hotel when he got a call from then-head-coach Ravi Shastri: “Come down and see me, I’m at the pool.” (Where else? And with a cool drink in his hand too.)

“You’re playing tomorrow,” Shastri told him, and added some other stuff, but Yadav was already turning cartwheels in his mind. On game day, Shastri told him: “Don’t think too much. Land the first punch.” But he didn’t get to bat that game. Next match, the first ball he faced was peak Jofra Archer. He hooked it for a six. “First punch.” The words rang in his head. He has not stopped landing punches since. This World Cup, India depends on this grizzled heavy-hitter doing his thing.