“You can’t judge a guy’s form based on how he’s playing the first ball… You can’t say a guy is out of form if he does not get past the first ball,” Mumbai Indians’ coach Mark Boucher said just before the start of this season’s Indian Premier League (IPL).
Boucher called Suryakumar Yadav “probably the best T20 player in the world right now”. But he had to defend Yadav, who is going through one of those forgettable phases in his career when the runs have been hard to come by.
In three one-day internationals (ODI) against Australia last month, Yadav was out first ball in all three matches, twice leg-before wicket to Mitchell Starc. It was the first time a player had this kind of an embarrassing hat-trick in a bilateral series and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In his last eight international innings, Yadav has scores of 14 (ODI), 47, 26, 24 (T20Is), 8 (Test), 0, 0 and 0 (ODIs) suggesting the beginning of a drought of runs for the world’s number one T20I batter (as per ICC - International Cricket Council - rankings). In his last eight innings in 2022, Yadav had much more impressive scores of 15, 51, 68, 30, 61, 14, 111, 13 in T20Is.
“Hopefully, when he faces the first ball in the IPL, the crowd will cheer and he will be back to business,” Boucher said then.
In his first IPL match of the season on April 2, 2023, against Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB), Yadav scored a 16-ball 15 in Mumbai Indians’ total of 171 propelled mainly by Tilak Varma’s 84. RCB won the match by a comfortable eight wickets.
Yadav’s dip in form stands in stark contrast to his career statistics so far. In 48 T20Is, he has an average of over 46, with three hundreds and 13 50s, scoring at an astonishing strike rate of 175. In eight matches of the IPL last season, he scored at an average of over 43 and a strike rate of 145. In the IPL since 2018, Yadav has consistently scored at more than 130 (runs per 100 balls) and at an average of over 30 (barring in 2021).
“He is probably in that phase now where he needs to do something,” the news agency PTI quoted former RCB player AB de Villiers as saying about Yadav, who has frequently been compared to the South African for his “360 degree batting”. “But the secret of it all is not to panic and not to change your game plan. He has got to stick to what has been working for him over the years.”
“It is not a bad thing just to come a level down and spend a little time in there before you pop out again,” added de Villiers. “You cannot always score 100 off 40 balls—it is not always going to happen. That is something I had to learn the hard way with the Chinnaswamy (Bengaluru) crowd going, expecting me to score a hundred in every game.”
Numbers point to poorer returns for Yadav in ODIs, in comparison to T20s. In 23 international matches, he has an average of 24, a strike rate of just over 100 and only two scores over 50. He last scored a half-century in February 2022, 64 against the West Indies in Ahmedabad.
“He is learning the 50-over game a little bit, I think. T20 is slightly different even though he hadn’t played for India in a really long time. In T20 cricket, he has played nearly 10 years of IPL, which is a tournament like international cricket. I think he has not played a lot of one-day cricket,” India coach Rahul Dravid said after the second ODI against Australia.
“I checked on him (Yadav) about how he’s feeling,” Boucher added, “and he said ‘coach I am hitting the ball well’.”
Considering the rate at which Yadav was batting last year, the law of averages was bound to catch up. Virat Kohli, who has been playing international cricket for far longer, has gone through an extended slump in the recent past. For Yadav to move forward, he would have to add consistency to his flashy batting in at least the two white-ball formats.
Mumbai Indians play their second IPL match on Saturday against Chennai Super Kings (CSK). In 15 matches that he has played against CSK, Yadav has 313 runs, with a highest of an unbeaten 71 and an average of under 30.
With Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant out of the international team for some time with their injuries, a consistent Yadav would be an asset in the Indian middle order. He would not only need to improve his ODI scores—currently his weakest format—but get back into hitting them big in T20s as well. India hosts the 50-over World Cup this year in October, which gives Yadav time to bring his ODI batting on par with his T20 batting from 2022.
Before that, MI would hope he lights up this IPL, to justify his number one ranking in T20s.
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