Suryakumar, Sooryavanshi and a difficult balance

Indian cricket’s present-day decision makers — selection committee chief Ajit Agarkar and coach Gautam Gambhir — have put in place a system, and Suryakumar Yadav has just come up against it. Three months after captaining India to the T20 World Cup title in Ahmedabad, the 35-year-old is likely to be removed as captain and also dropped from the squad. The call follows a template that Agarkar and Gambhir have applied almost without exception: Rohit Sharma’s Test decline was not managed, it was ended; Virat Kohli retired soon after; Shubman Gill, already Test captain, was dropped from the T20 World Cup squad despite being named vice-captain just months earlier. The prolonged absence of another senior, Mohammad Shami, from the national team follows the same logic. That Suryakumar won 40 of 52 matches as captain, never lost a bilateral series, and still finds himself here is not a contradiction — it is the system working exactly as designed. His numbers — 270 runs in 13 IPL innings at an average of 20.76 — made the arithmetic straightforward.

During his tenure, Suryakumar had made Gambhir’s philosophy his own on the field — he wanted India to become a “cricket-loving country rather than a cricketer-loving one”. But sport has shown that indulging stars, giving them a longer rope than others, can benefit the team, too. Rahul Dravid, Gambhir’s predecessor as coach, offered a counterargument. “Any sport needs its heroes,” Dravid said. “You can’t capture the imagination of a nation if you don’t deliver on the field. To become a legend or a superstar in India means you’ve done a lot of things right and, in the process, you’ve also helped your team win.” The trophy and the icon, in his reading, are not rivals. They are part of the same transaction. With the 2028 Olympics and a hat-trick of T20 World Cup titles on the horizon, the cost of getting that balance wrong is high.

Advertisement

Into this space has stepped 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi — 583 IPL runs at a strike rate of 232 in his second season — who, unlike previous young stars who came with promise, arrives with box-office. The crowds come specifically to watch him, not to appreciate a team philosophy. Managing a phenomenon like that within a system seemingly sceptical of hero worship will require something subtler than policy. Dravid left the argument open. Sooryavanshi may force it shut.