It’s Suryakumar Yadav’s eyes that tell the story. They don’t light up when he sees a bad ball as the commentators are prone to say. There’s no frantic scanning and surveying of the field. They remain calm, and they alone should hold off a tempest, like the one at Perth on Sunday. The captain had perished, the hero had drowned. His 40- ball 68 against South Africa was on a fast and bouncy track against a frightening quartet of hard-length perpetrators.
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Surya is just 35 international T20 innings old. Yet, in this briefest of periods, he has remade T20 batting in his own image. Every time he makes the world believe that he has compiled his greatest knock, he makes them rethink. Within days, he raises the bar, comes up with a new greatest knock.
This was a night when all there was to do was gawp at the player who can bend the game according to his own laws. He met fire with ice. The most devilishly speeding bouncer would scream onto his bat. Then fly off it, defused of all its devilishness. He unfurled some outrageous strokes—a down-the-line forehand off Kagiso Rabada that would have some tennis players drooling for its power and precision.
Like a textbook forehand, he made sure that he moved into the ball, a mini leap enabling him to get on top of the ball, and kept the shoulder on the same line all the way through the stroke. He did not turn the shoulder until he was through with the shot. The hands, the eyes, the muscles, and the mind in perfect synchronisation; there are no links that rebel.
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He plays a lot of strokes, but each of them sticks in the mind. He grants even the humdrum every day stroke with a shade of grandeur. Like the flick. His first six was a flick, a searing 89 mph-er from Anrich Nortje that he twirled over fine leg. No extravagance, no flourish, just touches, glides and deflection, hitting the ball with just enough fade to glide through the narrow target areas. Nortje looked baffled, just as shocked Lungi Ngidi was when he cuffed a short of length ball outside off-stump over fine leg.
The speed-gun flickered that the ball clocked 143 kph. But it looked slower. It’s the gift to create the illusion of time, that he has more time than the rest to do the most outrageous things.
But none of these was his most memorable stroke of the night. It was a simple off-drive off Ngidi that the mid-off fielder dashed to abort, the high front-elbow winking at the inky skies, the ball purring along the ground, perhaps dusting up grainy memories of Sachin Tendulkar at the WACA three decades ago. In quality as well as context, Yadav’s knock was the T20 equivalent of Tendulkar’s 116. And both ended in tears.
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Time, thus, is knocking on to put him as the contemporary benchmark of T20 batting. Chris Gayle is a spent force; Babar Azam, however graceful he is, does not score his runs as fast as Yadav does. Azam picks his runs at 128; Yadav at 178. The power-hitters of the world are nowhere as consistent as him in delivering match-bending knocks in high-pressure situations. T20 cricket, truly, is living in the era of Suryakumar Yadav. The Perth knock was the greatest, grandest example. How will he now raise the bar? Even for him, it won’t be easy but then he has proved us wrong, before, hasn’t he?
