Suryakumar Yadav smashed his first ball in international cricket for six
Suryakumar Yadav, known as SKY, waited more than a decade after his Mumbai debut for an India cap, then hit the very first delivery he faced in international cricket for six, a first for an Indian in T20 internationals. He went on to top the world T20 rankings and to captain India to a T20 World Cup.
Born in Bombay on 14 September 1990 to parents from Ghazipur in Uttar Pradesh, he first learned the game under an uncle in Varanasi, joined a camp in Mumbai's BARC colony at ten and later trained at Dilip Vengsarkar's academy. He played club cricket mainly for Parsi Gymkhana and debuted for Mumbai in February 2010. Domestic success came early: 754 runs in the 2011–12 Ranji Trophy, the most for his side, and 788 runs with three hundreds when Mumbai won the title in 2015–16. In the IPL he won with Kolkata in 2014 and with Mumbai Indians in 2019 and 2020.
His India debut came in March 2021 against England. In the fourth match, on 18 March, he launched his opening ball over the rope and made a half-century. In July 2022 he scored 117 from 55 balls at Trent Bridge, then 111 not out at Mount Maunganui, and a 45-ball hundred against Sri Lanka at Rajkot in January 2023 was the second fastest by an Indian in the format. His rating of 910 was the second highest in T20I ranking history, and he held the top spot from October 2022 to June 2024, winning the ICC's T20I player of the year award in both 2022 and 2023.
Other formats proved harder. His only Test came in February 2023 against Australia at Nagpur, and in the one-day series that followed he was out first ball three games running, the first Indian batter to suffer that.
In the 2024 T20 World Cup final against South Africa, he held a catch right at the boundary in the last over to remove David Miller, and India won by seven runs. As captain he then led India to the 2025 Asia Cup and the 2026 T20 World Cup. More than three-quarters of his international runs, and all four of his centuries, have come in T20 internationals. He married dance coach Devisha Shetty in 2016.
Source: Suryakumar Yadav
