BOLDLY YOURS
Suryakumar Yadav beats Jofra Archer in the game against Rajasthan Royals. © BCCI
More than a decade later, Austin Coutinho, Suryakumar Yadav’s coach, still remembers the final of the Mumbai Under-19 tournament. It was a 45 on one side affair and all he had asked of his ward, who was opening the entrances, was to continue to the end. Surya confidently convinced her coach “Haan lord, mein karunga” [Yes sir, I’ll bat through]
However, that confidence didn’t hold up for long with Austin, as Surya swept a quick six-shooter on the first ball of his innings. “I knew there was no way to stop this guy from there,” Austin sighs as he remembers.
That there was a high level of skill on display was one thing, but the fact that there was the audacity to achieve it was another. As Surya explains, the intrepid approach to hitting came from practicing shooting as a child while playing rubber ball cricket.
“In the rainy season, we used to play on hard concrete surfaces. The limit on the offside would be 30-40 meters, but on the leg side it used to be 70-80 meters. From there, I started to play the ball, the sweep. and the turn. All these [innovative shots] they have come from there. I developed that habit of playing with the rubber ball, knowing that it won’t hurt when you play the sweep or the lap. [and miss]. ”
But IPL is not a rubber ball cricket, especially against Jofra Archer, who can make the ball come off the surface quickly. And yet Surya attempted the turn against him only one delivery after receiving a head pin. The blow was so strong that it had him “disturbed” for a few hours.
“That was one of the best moments for me from that game. After getting hit to the head, I felt like my brain fell into place for that shot,” he joked.
“Hardik was there at the other end. He was like ‘Boss, this is the moment, let’s do something different.’ So I asked him ‘with this field, what do you feel, what are you going to try now?’ Then he said ‘I might hit a yorker, I think’. So I was prepared for that. That’s one of the shots I was practicing during the home run. Thinking about that, I tried and executed and it worked very well and was very happy about it “.
Luckily for him, it wasn’t Archer’s fast yorker, but a slower delivery that gave Surya enough time to settle under the ball and lick it off.
While Surya has his set of leg strengths, the offseason also gave him time to strengthen his game on the offside. He brought his full range of shots to the fore en route to his season’s early fifties, in a winning performance against the Rajasthan Royals.
“I just wanted to make it stronger and add it to my arsenal so that tomorrow, if someone comes up with a plan against me, I can counter it,” he explained. “I just wanted to make it a little easier for him, I didn’t want to complicate my hitting. Obviously, my strongest areas stayed the same. I just wanted to go a step forward and see what I can do if I had these (shots) too. Everything is going great so far. “.
His shots flow smoothly, despite frustratingly not getting as many scores as he would like. However, when he resumed cricket after the outbreak of the pandemic, he felt that hitting was not as easy as he was used to.
“When I went to the ground (for IM camp in Mumbai) and started hitting, a few days were tough. But then I had a conversation with Rohit and I said ‘I haven’t been hitting for the last two or three months and now that I’m hitting I don’t feel like the same Surya who hit in March. ‘
“Then he said to me, ‘just come, pick your bat, start playing for a few days. Don’t get hard on the nets. Slowly, after a few days, a week or ten days, you’ll be back.’ ‘ Same way as before. I kept following what he was saying and kept asking him what I should do to get back to the way he was before. He said, ‘Just get everything out of your mind and go. Be clear about what you want.’
He has also credited his Mumbai Indians captain for helping him on his cricket journey, especially when he was given the responsibility of hitting higher in the team order.
“Whenever we meet, there is always a conversation, be it the beginning, the middle or the end, there is always something I can learn from him. Whenever I sit down and talk to him, I try to gain a lot of insights into how he understands his cricket. As he is also a top hitter, he shares his experiences of what he did when he started playing like this and tells me “try this, it might help.”
“In the last two or three years, I have trusted him blindly and followed everything he said. I knew what my game was and I understood what he was trying to tell me to do better that day. A point that can help carry my “I’m one step ahead. He’s always there, maybe on the floor, during the game, in practice sessions or in the team room. It’s always good to have him around and have his support.”
© Cricbuzz
