It is not from long ago, this memory. Suryakumar Yadav, arms raised, trophy aloft, the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad a roaring sea behind him. Three months ago, he 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 get his hands on that trophy. On Thursday, June 4, India had moved on. The World Cup-winning captain, sacked.
King one day. Footnote the next.
Consider the arc. Suryakumar did not even make his international debut until he was 30 — an age at which most careers are past their peak. He spent years on Mumbai’s domestic circuit, watching others get picked ahead of him, waiting for a door that seemed permanently shut. When it finally opened, he walked through it and became arguably the most entertaining T20 batter in the world — No. 1 ranked, two ICC T20I Cricketer of the Year awards, a strike rate that made bowlers look ordinary. And then, in 2024, the captaincy, not to Hardik Pandya, who had been widely tipped as Rohit’s natural successor, but to Suryakumar. Gambhir and the selectors backed the late bloomer. At 33, he became captain. At 35, it is apparently all over.
Sources confirmed Shreyas Iyer will be named his successor when the squads for the Ireland and England T20I series are announced on Saturday. More starkly, Suryakumar is unlikely to be considered for selection at all. A World Cup-winning captain, gone before he could play another game.
WHY THE SACK?
Why? The answer is form, and it has been coming for a while. 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 set in long before that. Last year, he averaged 13.62 in T20Is at a strike rate of 130 — numbers that belong to a tailender, not a man who spent the better part of two years ranked No. 1 in the world. The year before, he averaged 26. In his last ten T20Is, he managed just two fifty-plus scores. A wrist injury was speculated; Suryakumar dismissed the talk during the IPL. He kept insisting he was not out of form, merely out of runs. It is a distinction that matters to him. To the selectors, the scorebook tells only one story.
The deeper problem is not just Suryakumar’s form in isolation. It 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 title-winning runs, represents exactly the kind of hungry, in-form middle-order batter who is pushing his case. When the queue outside the door contains players of that quality, a two-year form slump is not a rough patch. It is an invitation for the selectors to act. Suryakumar, perhaps, understood this better than anyone. Which makes his failure to find runs all the more puzzling.
Off the field, he was rarely out of the headlines either. From the handshake episode involving Pakistan to his decision not to collect the Asia Cup trophy from PCB chief Mohsin Naqvi, Suryakumar was at the forefront of controversies that followed the team like background noise. None of it amounted to a black spot on his captaincy record — he won all eight bilateral T20I series, the Asia Cup 2025, and then the World Cup in Ahmedabad. His relationship with Gambhir remained intact. By every conventional measure, his tenure was a success. The captaincy was never the problem. The batting was.
Former selector Saba Karim put it plainly.
“On current form, Suryakumar may not be a part of the selection committee’s vision to take this team forward. We have seen that in the past — the selection committee moved from Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli and they picked a new side. So, one can see that happening even now for the T20 World Cup that will take place in 2028. Even in the World Cup, Suryakumar’s form was very indifferent and that has continued in the IPL. I think the selectors have to look ahead,” Karim told PTI.
INDIAN CRICKET IS MOVING ON FASTER
That broader shift is worth pausing on. This is not an isolated decision, it is part of a pattern Indian cricket has been quietly establishing. Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, two of the greatest to have played 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 had made the writing legible even from a distance. In ODIs, neither man’s place is guaranteed anymore. The selectors have made clear that legacy buys you respect, not a permanent berth. If Rohit and Kohli are operating under that scrutiny at the tail end of distinguished careers, Suryakumar, carrying two years of indifferent returns in the one format where he still mattered, was always going to find little shelter behind his World Cup medal. A decade ago, Indian cricket waited for its champions to decide when they were done. Sachin got a farewell series. Dhoni quietly opted himself out of ODIs in 2020 with no selector willing to make the first move. That era is firmly over.
For Suryakumar, the hardest part may not be the sacking itself. It may be the manner of it. No farewell game, no guard of honour, no last innings in blue. The man who caught David Miller on the boundary to seal the 2024 World Cup, who made 360-degree strokeplay look like a birthright, finds out his international career is over through a newspaper quote. That is a particular kind of cold. But it is also, in part, a situation of his own making. Two years of poor returns in the format where he was most valued left the selectors with little choice, and little reason to feel they owed him more time.
Suryakumar had spoken of targeting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where cricket makes its debut, as his next frontier. The selectors appear to have decided that the road runs through Iyer.
The need for a new captain in a new cycle is understandable. But should he not have gotten a couple of games first — against Ireland, against England — before the door was shut entirely? There is a school of thought that a Suryakumar in form against weaker opposition would only have complicated the selectors’ plans. Perhaps that is precisely why the opportunity was never given.
It is a bold call. It may even be the right one. But did a World Cup-winning captain deserve, at the very least, the chance to fail on his own terms?
– Ends
