🇮🇳 Suryakumar Yadav

He was born in Mumbai in September 1990, the son of Ashok Yadav, a Bhabha Atomic Research Centre engineer, and Swapna. The family lived for years in the BARC township at Anushaktinagar in eastern Mumbai — a township adjacent to a nuclear reactor — where Suryakumar spent the bulk of his childhood. He trained at the Parsee Gymkhana in Mumbai, learning from coach Chandrakant Pandit a Mumbai-school technique he then spent his twenties slowly disassembling.

He played the Ranji Trophy for Mumbai and was, for the next several seasons, a domestic giant in Bombay's cricket. He led Mumbai to the 2015–16 Ranji title. He played for Mumbai Indians, Kolkata Knight Riders, and Mumbai Indians again in the IPL — totalling more than 3,500 IPL runs across the decade — and was, for years, the most prolific batter not playing for India. His mid-twenties were a long, public wait.

The wait ended in March 2021 when he was thirty. India recalled him for a T20I series against England at Ahmedabad. He scored 57 from 31 on debut, hitting Jofra Archer for a flat-batted hook over fine leg that became, within an hour, the most shared cricket clip on Indian social media. He has, since then, redefined the geometry of T20 batting. He plays scoops, reverse-paddles, flat-batted square cuts, lap-pulls over fine leg, and a back-handed paddle over short third man that he himself has not given a name to.

He scored three T20I hundreds in 2022 — Nottingham against England (117 off 55), the Wankhede against Sri Lanka (112* off 51), and Rajkot against New Zealand (111* off 51) — making him the first Indian batter with three T20I hundreds. By the end of 2022 he was ICC's No. 1-ranked T20 batter, a position he has held, with brief interruptions, for most of the time since.

He was appointed India's full-time T20I captain in late 2023 after Hardik Pandya's injury and Rohit Sharma's white-ball transition. He led India to a series win against Australia at home in November 2023, then captained India to the T20 World Cup in the Caribbean and the United States in June 2024, where he took the famous boundary-rope catch off Miller that won the final.

He is married to Devisha Shetty, a dancer he met at college; they were married in 2016 and live in Mumbai. He has spoken openly about the years between twenty-three and thirty when he was the highest run-scorer outside the India squad — about the patience, the failed call-ups, the conversations with his wife about whether to take up coaching. He has said that he reads the same Bhagavad Gita passage every match morning. He has also said that he no longer reads cricket Twitter on the day of a match. The boundary catch, in his own description, was 'eight seconds I will not remember in the way the world will'.

Test cricket has remained the one room he has not properly entered. He has played a handful of Tests with mixed returns and has, in interviews after the 2024 World Cup, refused to publicly write off the format. The argument against him — that his white-ball game cannot survive in red-ball conditions — has the same shape as the argument that kept him out of India's white-ball side until age thirty. He has, accordingly, taken the same approach: train, score in domestic cricket, wait. The boys he grew up batting with in Mumbai's club nets — Rohit, Pandya, Ishan, Shreyas — have all said the same thing. SKY is the most patient cricketer they know.

He is, in 2026, the captain of Mumbai Indians in the IPL after taking over from Hardik Pandya, the captain of India in T20Is, and a national-level brand whose endorsements include Boost, Cred and Hyundai. He has spoken, quietly, of opening an academy in Mumbai for late-bloomer cricketers — a place, in his words, 'for the boys nobody picked at sixteen'.