SKY-fall – Anatomy of a poor run

At the fall of Abhishek Sharma’s wicket, Suryakumar Yadav walked into the spanking new cauldron of noise in Mullanpur, New Chandigarh, the young venue hosting its first international match. Because Sharma had nicked out on the final ball of the second over, Surya, captain of the country’s T20I side, and one who will lead India’s defense of the T20 World Cup at home next year, had to wait at the non-striker’s end until he had his chance to place bat on ball.

The wait lasted the entirety of the following over, faced wholly by the surprising presence of Axar Patel at No.3. When Yadav got his chance at the beginning of the fourth, with the tall Marco Jansen at the top of his mark, commentator Ravi Shastri said this on air: “He’s due a big one here. Surya has been due a big score.”

He was. SKY really was.

Surya, or SKY, is one of the finest T20 batsmen of all time. There are no riders or asterisks to that statement, given that the 35-year-old has four hundreds in the format in international cricket, second only to the five centuries smacked by his leadership predecessor, Rohit Sharma, and Australia’s short-format wizard, Glenn Maxwell. But here’s the thing about that stat – the last of those hundreds by Surya was scored in India’s last match of 2023. Which means that at one point, Surya had four hundreds from his first 60 games representing India, the kind of numbers that makes one the first name on the team-sheet, and a shoo-in for the armband, which he received as soon as Rohit walked into the sunset with the T20 World Cup trophy in hand by mid-2024.

However, in nearly 40 matches more since those first whirlwind 60, Surya has no more hundreds. It gets worse. This year, 2025, a tune-up year to the upcoming World Cup in February no less, the captain of the Indian team was yet to score a fifty in the format, despite having played 16 innings before Thursday’s match in Punjab. That’s 197 runs in a long calendar year, scored at an average of less than 15 per innings. This form, or lack of, has of course had a knock-on effect on his aura, with Surya’s batting average of 45 at the end of 2023 having fallen by 10 whole runs per innings to 35 by the end of 2025.

The reason? Apart from the saddle of leadership, it’s hard to say why, given that when SKY shored up at this year’s IPL purely as a Mumbai Indians batsman – free of any leadership role – he banged out 520 more runs than he has for India this year in exactly as many batting innings, 16, at a phenomenal average of 65, studded with five fifties. That IPL tally of 717 runs was second, narrowly, only to Orange Cap-winner Sai Sudharsan’s 759 runs, and 60 runs more than IPL-winner Virat Kohli.

Hence, “due a big one”, punched out in Shastri’s baritone, was on-the-money.

To a cheer of mixed expectations, which makes sense given that India was chasing over 200 and a very-out-of-form batter was on strike, Jansen ran in towards Surya and bowled a wide well outside off stump. The first legal delivery, next ball, was guided through backward point for a boundary and the said cauldron of noise lifted. Boundary first ball, could this finally be the night to turn a year’s worth of agony?

No. For when Surya tried to guide a back-of-a-length and away-nipping Jansen delivery once again through the square on the off side, the commentators thought they had heard a nick, even though the umpire didn’t budge and the fielders on the turf seemed completely unsure.   

So much so that South Africa captain Aiden Markram was most hesitant to review the decision, even as the timer very nearly ran out. But just when the Indian captain thought he had gotten away with it, the clock now down to 2 seconds, Markram crossed his palms into a T. And just like that, curtains had fallen on yet another innings that failed to blossom for SKY in 2025, this time out for 5, making it his ninth single-digit score in 17 innings this year in T20Is.