Skyfall: Did Suryakumar Yadav deserve to be fired without a final act?

Not so long ago, this memory. Suryakumar Yadav, hands raised, trophy in the air, Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, the roaring sea behind him. Three months ago, this was the man who had just led India to an unprecedented back-to-back T20 World Cup title – only the third captain in history, after MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma, to lift the trophy. On Thursday, June 4, India moved on. The World Cup winning captain was sacked.

King for a day. Another footnote.

Consider the arc. Suryakumar didn’t even make his international debut until he was 30 – an age at which most careers are past their peak. He spent years on the home circuit of Mumbai, watching others get picked ahead of him and waiting for a door that seemed permanently closed. When he finally opened up, he breezed through it to become arguably the most entertaining T20 batsman in the world – No.1, two ICC T20I Cricketer of the Year awards, a success rate that makes bowlers look ordinary. And then, in 2024, the captaincy, not Hardik Pandya, who was widely tipped as Rohit’s natural successor, but Suryakumar. Gambhir and the selectors encouraged the late bloomer. At 33, he became a captain. At 35, it’s apparently over.

Sources have confirmed that Shreyas Iyer will be named as his successor when the squads for the Ireland and England T20I series are announced on Saturday. More pointedly, Suryakumar is unlikely to even be considered for selection. The World Cup winning captain left before he could play another game.

WHY A BAG?

Why? The answer is form, and it’s been coming for some time. IPL 2026 was his last real audition and he managed just 270 runs in 13 matches at 20.76 for a Mumbai Indians side that finished ninth. But the rot had set in long before that. Last year he averaged 13.62 in T20Is with a strike rate of 130 – numbers that belong to a tailender, not a man who spent the better part of two years at world No. 1. The year before, he averaged 26. He managed just two fifty-plus scores in his last ten T20Is. There was speculation about a wrist injury; Suryakumar spoke during the IPL. He still insisted he wasn’t out of shape, just out of shape. It’s the difference that matters to him. The scorecard tells only one story to the selectors.

The deeper problem is not just Suryakumar’s form in isolation. This is what Indian cricket looks like around him. This is a team with an assembly line that does not sit idle. Shreyas Iyer, fresh off a couple of dominant IPL seasons, has been pressing his case for over a year. Rajat Patidar, who has been a revelation in RCB’s back-to-back series wins, represents exactly the kind of hungry, formal middle-order batsman to make his case. When the front line includes players of this quality, a two-year slump in form isn’t a rough patch. It is a call for selectors to act. Suryakumar perhaps understood this better than anyone else. Which makes his failure to find runs all the more puzzling.

Off the pitch, he was also rarely out of the headlines. From the handshake episode involving Pakistan to his decision not to collect the Asia Cup trophy from PCB chief Mohsin Naqvi, Suryakumar has been at the forefront of controversies that have followed the team like background noise. None of this was a black mark on his captaincy record – he won all eight bilateral T20I series, Asia Cup 2025 and then the World Cup in Ahmedabad. His relationship with Gambhir remained intact. By all conventional standards, his tenure was a success. The captain was never a problem. The bat was.

Former selector Saba Karim made it clear.

“On current form, Suryakumar may not be part of the selection committee’s vision to take this team forward. We have seen it in the past – the selection committee has moved on from Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli and picked a new side. So you can see that happening now for the T20 World Cup in 2028. Even in the World Cup, it has continued in Suryakumar and I think the form has been very much in the IPL. selectors have to watch forward,” Karim told PTI.

INDIAN CRICKET IS MOVING FASTER

This broader shift is worth pausing for. This is not an isolated decision, it is part of a pattern that Indian cricket has quietly established. Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, two of the greatest to play the game, retired from Tests in May 2025 – formally their own calls, but few believed the timing was entirely their own.

A dismal home season against New Zealand and a 3-1 thrashing in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy made the writing readable even from a distance. In ODIs, a place is no longer guaranteed to either. Voters have made it clear that inheritance earns you respect, not permanent residency. If Rohit and Kohli operate under this microscope at the end of distinguished careers, Suryakumar, enduring two years of indifferent returns in the only format he still cared about, has always found little refuge behind a World Cup medal. A decade ago, Indian cricket was waiting for its champions to decide when they were done. Sachin got a farewell series. Dhoni quietly opted out of ODIs in 2020 with no selector willing to make the first move. That era is definitely over.

For Suryakumar, the hardest part may not be the firing itself. It can be that way. No farewell game, no honor guard, no last shift in blue. The man who caught David Miller on the brink of sealing the 2024 World Cup and made the 360-degree stroke play look like he was born is finding his international career over via newspaper citation. This is a special kind of cold. But it is also partly a situation of his own making. Two years of poor returns in the format where he was most prized left the selectors with little choice and little reason to feel they owed him more time.

Suryakumar spoke of targeting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where cricket will make its debut, as his next frontier. The selectors seem to have decided that the road goes through Iyer.

The need for a new captain in a new cycle is understandable. But shouldn’t he have played a couple of games first – against Ireland, against England – before the door closed completely? There is a view that an in-form Suryakumar against weaker opposition would only complicate the selectors’ plans. Perhaps that is why this opportunity was never given.

It’s a bold call. It might even be the one. But did the World Cup-winning captain at least deserve a chance to fail on his own terms?

– The end

Published on:

05 Jun 2026 11:23 IST