It was gone midnight in Dubai when Suryakumar Yadav finally faced the media. India had the trophy, Pakistan had slipped away amid chatter about a half-packed team bus, and nobody seemed entirely sure who would hand over the silverware until the last minute. It summed up a tournament where the cricket often had to jostle for space with everything else.
Suryakumar’s own numbers were plain enough – 72 runs in seven knocks, a sequence that read 0, 5, 47*, 7, 12, 1 and 0. The pattern prompted obvious questions, but he met them with a shrug. “I feel I am not out of form, I feel I am out of runs,” he said. “I believe more in what I am doing in the nets and my preparation. So in matches, things are on autopilot.”
The runs may have dried up, yet his record as captain keeps ticking over. Since being handed the T20I job full-time, he has led India past Sri Lanka, South Africa and England, and now through an Asia Cup that ended with seven wins on the spin and a ninth title overall.
Abhishek Sharma, sat alongside after collecting the Player-of-the-Tournament medal, offered the public backing every captain appreciates. “I’ve felt personally that when you are not scoring runs, it is difficult to take the team along. But Surya bhai is the same irrespective of whether he has scored runs or not,” the opener said.
Off the field, Suryakumar found himself in the middle of a fairly needless storm. It began with a routine handshake with Asian Cricket Council and PCB chair Mohsin Naqvi at the captains’ presser, a moment social media swiftly over-interpreted. A week later, at the toss against Pakistan, he appeared to blank opposite number Salman Agha. Cue another round of hot takes and, before long, a quiet word from the match referee.
“I feel it was not that difficult [to deal with],” Suryakumar said of the noise. “The boys took it in their stride. Since day one, I was just telling them to focus on cricket and enjoy the game. The boys took it in a positive way. We were very focused in every game.”
Inside the camp, the message stayed simple: park the chatter, bank the skills. Results suggest it worked, even if the top order occasionally wobbled – India were 10 for 2 in the final after Suryakumar chipped Shaheen Afridi to mid-off – before the middle battled home.
Looking ahead, the captain put the emphasis on broader gains rather than personal tallies. “What we wanted to achieve in this tournament, we have achieved,” he said. “There are a lot of things which you don’t get to achieve in a bilateral tournament. This was like a knock-out rehearsal.”
He will still want runs, obviously. No one stays at No.1 in the T20I batting rankings without them. But a skipper who trusts his method rarely panics in September when the World Cup waits in February. For now, Suryakumar can live with being, in his own words, “out of runs”. The form, he reckons, will look after itself once the calendar turns and the spotlight swings back to cricket rather than handshakes.
