Suryakumar Yadav's 73-run knock against Delhi: A throwback to pre-360 degree life

Indian Express

22-05-2025

The first beam of light from Suryakumar Yadav's bat to the third-man fence flashed in the penultimate ball of Mumbai Indians innings. The 42nd ball he faced against Delhi Capitals, he crouched and dabbed a wide yorker past the wicket-keeper to the sprawling real estate between third man and fine-leg where T20 batting's greatest field-space-time manipulator, in the post AB-era, finds a bulk of his runs.
It took his most familiar boundary route to realise that he had taken the most unfamiliar path to travel this far. Then, the innings, an outlier in his album of improvised destructibility, captured his firm grounding in the pre-modern times, a throwback to the pre-360-degree life of Suryakumar.
Before SKY, there existed Surya. He burst forth as a proper red-ball cricketer in Mumbai leagues in the late aughts, when playing straight and scoring big fetched the greatest rewards in the game, when T20 cricket had not yet transformed the geography of batting and initiated the era of disruptive shot innovation. He made his first-class debut in 2010, and eight long years would pass before he fully evolved into a T20 giant. He was not so much of a 360-degree exponent as a classical stroke-maker.
This innings of methodical aggression was SKY's ode to Surya, punctuating his brilliance at hitting in the orthodox V, and finding the conventional pockets of gap, but still hitting at a strike rate of 170, still confounding bowlers and still winning games. Sizing up the surface, sluggish and where the odd ball gripped and spat, he blindfolded himself to the temptations behind the wicket-keeper, the one-handed frolics and one-legged pirouetting were set apart for quicker decks, and harnessed all his energy to threading the ball through the gaps in front of him, often with brute force and bottom-handed savagery. Against the wrist-spin duet of Kuldeep Yadav and Vipraj Nigam who found bite from the surface, he turned ascetic. Apart from a cut when Kuldeep erred on the shorter side, he was content sneaking singles and twos.
The innings was Dhoni-like in rendition. Gritting out and hanging on, punishing the loose balls, and going berserk in the endgame. At one stage, he was 22 off 21 balls; the next 22 earned him 51.
Intermittently, he opened his stance, wandered in the crease, threatened to scoop and ramp, but those were all theatrics to distract bowlers and force them to bowl fuller at him, his safest zone for him to uncork the most productive shots on the surface. The fundamentals were pegged around the same basic movement, opening out his front foot to create that power-hitting base, the eyes and head still, limbs balanced and his mind processing a picture of the angles and spaces in the field, recalibrated minutely as the ball entered his arc.
The same elastic wrists that guide and glide the ball past the fielders behind him attain a sudden fury. His first six off the night captured the essence. He danced down the track to Mustafizur Rahman's slower ball and clumped it over his head, a flat and furious swipe, similar to AB de Villiers' hits on similarly slow surfaces where he can harness the bowler's pace. When there is no impetus on the ball, Surya, like AB, generates their own momentum with strong shoulders and a stable lower body. Rarely was Suryakumar spotted off-balance when he imparted incredible power into his strokes.
All four of his sixes were struck in the arch between extra cover and mid-wicket. The most incredible was a thump through extra cover off Mukesh Kumar's 19th over. Mukesh had erred on the fuller side outside the off-stump, Suryakumar just stretched his hands, the knees flexed and swung the ball over the fence. The moment the bowlers offered him a hint of width, he smeared them through cover or extra cover. When they tried to compensate by bowling into the stumps, he cuffed them through mid-wicket and wide long-on. Balls of similar trajectories would have soared over the fine-leg fence on quicker surfaces.
That is the all-encompassing mastery of Suryakumar. He is imaginative on belters, and prudent in difficult climes. The knock symbolised his season, where he had been prolific without being spectacular, less flashier, less round-the-park, but equally potent and destructive the driving force behind the renaissance. He has stealthily climbed to the third spot on the orange cap pile, his 583 runs coming at a strike rate of 170.46. Among the top-10 this season, only Prabhsimran Singh has a better hitting rate (171).
Not that he has entirely stopped hitting behind the stumps, but he has become wiser in changing his approach according to the nature of the pitch. Every batsman tries to, but in the relentless T20 churn, some fail to revise their methods, trapped in their own image.
Perhaps, the eye-opener was the relative slump preluding the league. His last eight T20 innings for the country had fetched him only 54 runs. Premature and exaggerated talks of waning reflexes did the rounds.
The way out of the rut was in his own game, waiting to be discovered. So he turned the clock back, reacquainted with the Surya of maidans and rediscovered the runs and boundaries. So he adopted a more traditional approach, the zenith being the 73 not out against DC. 'This is one innings which I was hoping for a long time: a difficult situation, to bat through to the end. It was a slightly slow wicket with the weather around. We wanted to take it deep, talked about that during the practice sessions, planned for it and batted accordingly,' he explained to the host broadcasters during the innings break.
But the 360-degree avatar would not be far behind, waiting to resurface and consume helpless fast bowlers in its raging flames.