Suryakumar Yadav

Suryakumar Yadav player profile

Hard-hitting 360-degree batter Suryakumar Yadav has all the shots, including a few not in any textbook save the one written by AB de Villiers. He also has a yen for making batting look easy, as he showed during four golden years with Mumbai Indians starting in 2018, during which they won the IPL title twice, thanks in no small part to his 1700-plus runs at a strike rate of around 140.

He made 73 on his Ranji Trophy debut, for Mumbai in 2010, and the following season scored 754 from nine games, the most by anyone from his team. That tally included a double-century against Orissa in his third match of the season, and a hundred in the next. He capped the season with yet another hundred, in the Duleep Trophy. After a blip in 2012-13, he was back among the runs the next season, where he finished among Mumbai's top three run-getters.

Suryakumar spent four seasons with Kolkata Knight Riders, starting in their second IPL title-winning year, 2014, though with 608 runs from 54 games he didn't quite provide a foretaste of what he would go on to do with Mumbai Indians in the years that followed.

Suryakumar's first international came belatedly in 2021, whereupon he hooked the first ball he faced in a T20I, from Jofra Archer, for six. He produced two fifties in his first three T20Is, and the year after, made 117 off 55 in a game where India fell short in the face of a massive 215 by England.

Suryakumar Yadav IPL factfile

- Suryakumar Yadav, also known as SKY, is one of the most inventive and explosive batters in T20 cricket, drawing comparisons with AB de Villiers for his 360-degree range of shots.

- SKY was part of the MI squad in the 2012 and 2013 seasons but played only one game, in which he was dismissed for a duck.

- In 2014, SKY was bought by Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) but they failed to get the best out of him. He played for KKR for four years and did not score more than 200 runs in any IPL season.

- In the 2018 IPL auction, MI bought SKY once again and he had his breakthrough season, scoring 512 runs at a strike rate of 133.33.

- Since then, SKY has become a force at No. 3 and enjoyed his best IPL season in 2023, when he smashed 605 runs at a strike rate of 181.14. He has won two titles with MI, in 2019 and 2020.