Preliminary thoughts on Suryakumar Yadav from Ponting
Preliminary thoughts on Suryakumar Yadav from Ponting. Suryakumar Yadav’s popularity has grown a lot since he made his international debut in 2021. If he makes it big in Team India’s squad for the T20 World Cup, it will be a big step forward for him. Fans started paying attention to the batter after Mumbai Indians bought him in the 2018 auction. He lit up the 2020 and 2021 IPL seasons, leading to his first call-up to the India team. But former Australia cricketer Ricky Ponting thinks that when Suryakumar was picked to play for Kolkata Knight Riders, his “career started to turn around.”
Ponting’s views on the young SKY
When Ponting was at MI in 2013 and 2014, he saw a young Suryakumar Yadav. Suryakumar, who was only a teenager at the time, had to wait because the MI team was full of stars. In 2014, he moved to KKR, where he played for four years and scored 608 runs in 54 games. Even though he went back to MI in 2018 and scored 512 and 424 runs over the next two years, Ponting thinks Suryakumar really saw what he was capable of during his time with KKR.
“When I was in Mumbai, he was an 18-19 year old kid, a young man. He was in our squad not quite getting a game. The year after I left, he was traded to Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) where his career started to turn around. He got a bit of an opportunity in the middle order and then MI bought him back in the auction and has been a match-winning player for them for five or six seasons now, to the point that he is one of their retained players”, Ponting told ICC.
SKY’s mindset
Recently during an interview with Hindustan Times, Suryakumar spoke about his mindset and said, “The mindset has always been the same since I started playing, it just got a good direction to it. Nothing has changed. I always enjoy it (fearless approach). When I made my debut for Mumbai as well, the only thing which came to my mind was attack. At that time also, I used to feel attack is the best defense.”
“So, it kept building from that and slowly when I came into this set-up, I realised what my game was, how I can be a little different which can help my team from unreal situations, and I wanted to be a little different. I wanted to be batting in difficult situations and I wanted to be that factor a team is always looking for.”