Rajkot: It was Jan 7, 2023. Suryakumar Yadav, in the middle of a rare patch in which everything he touched turned into gold, gave the 29,000-capacity Rajkot crowd something they would cherish for the rest of their lives. Unfurling his 360-degree game in full glory, ‘SKY’ scorched the stage, blasting a breath-taking 51-ball 112 not out, studded with nine sixes and seven fours against a hapless Sri Lanka.
Cut to the present. When he leads Team India out in the third T20I against England at the Niranjan Shah Stadium here on Tuesday, Suryakumar will hope to not only wrap up a series win — the hosts have won both matches so far — but also rediscover the kind of form that saw him become the world’s No. 1 batsman in T20Is for a major part of the last three years.
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Handed India’s T20I captaincy after much debate — many felt star allrounder Hardik Pandya was more deserving of that role — Surya has hardly put a foot wrong as leader. At a time when India’s Test team has lost two series on the trot, the T20 side has given plenty of cheer to fans. However, the big blip is that the captain’s own form has dipped.
Since the T20 World Cup in 2024, the 34-year-old has only scored two half-centuries in his last 11 T20I innings, in which he has scored 242 runs at an average of only 22, a major drop from his career average of 39.72, although his strike rate reads 165.75.
All the explosive 33-year-old scored in 2024 was 429 runs at an average of 26.81, although he did strike a 35-ball 75 against Bangladesh last year. In domestic cricket too, he scored only 132 runs in five matches at 26.4, with just one fifty in Mumbai’s triumphant run in the Syed Mushtaq Ali T20 Trophy. In the Vijay Hazare Trophy, all he managed was 38 runs in five matches at 9.5.
It’s a far cry from when he was a on a run-scoring spree in both 2022 and 2023. He was the leading run-scorer in 2022 with 1164 runs in 31 innings at 46.56 and a strike rate of 187.43, hitting two centuries and nine half-centuries. In 2023, he scored 733 runs in 23 innings at 48.86 and a strike rate of 155.95. With India’s Test and ODI skipper Rohit too out of form, India can ill-afford both its captains struggling for runs at the same time.
In this series, Surya has got out for a duck in Kolkata and for 12 in Chennai, where he played Brydon Carse onto his stumps.
