Suryakumar Yadav‘s back-to-back golden ducks – against the menacing Mitchell Starc in the first two ODIs – against Australia have put major doubts over the extension of his ODI career.
In the absence of the injured Shreyas Iyer and Rishabh Pant, SKY hasn’t really done enough to secure a place in the ODI side and repaid the faith that the selectors and the Indian management had put in him, in the hope of his replicating of his T20 success in ODI cricket in the year in which India host the all-important ODI World Cup 2023 in October-November.
With Pant unlikely to feature in the World Cup and Shreyas Iyer out of action for an indefinite period of time due to the recurrence of a back injury, the Dravid-Rohit management is pushing for SKY to be the X-factor in the middle-order that can take down spinners and amp up the scoring rate in the middle-overs – a phase of the game that proves to be crucial for success and failure of a side – with both bat and ball – in ODI cricket.
However, so far, the world’s number 1 T20I batsman has failed to crack the ODI code: SKY averages 25 in 20 ODI knocks with only 2 fifties – one against Sri Lanka in July 2021 and another against West Indies in February 2022. His List-A record – average of 34 and 22 fifty-plus scores in 111 innings – also isn’t that inspiring.
These could be a couple of reasons why Suryakumar Yadav hasn’t achieved success in ODIs yet:
Batting in 50-over cricket requires a different mindset to that in 20-over
There’s a reason why many great 50-over batters couldn’t get success in the 20-over format, and it’s the same reason why a number of T20 giants were just ordinary 50-over batters: the tempo of the game, and the requirement of pacing your innings in totally different in the two formats.
Where Suryakumar Yadav is needed to play his free-flowing, risky shots and to start the innings with a flourish, that is just hit the ground running in T20 cricket – in ODIs, with two new balls operating, and with a lot more overs to play for the team than in T20Is but with the same number of wickets available, he has to bat in a risk-averse, a bit traditional, more conservative more at the start of an innings for any batter slotted in the Top five.
And perhaps Suryakumar Yadav, although perhaps being given the license to play his natural game by the management in ODIs, gets his mind tangled with what tempo he needs to bat at in ODIs, where bowlers get into their rhythm better by bowling longer spells than the short spells of one or two overs they have to in T20Is.
Suryakumar has been pushed to bat in different positions by the team management
The team management has also not helped Suryakumar Yadav by putting him in 4 different positions in the batting order in his short ODI career.
In his 20 ODI innings so far, he’s batted at number 3 once, at number 4 five times, at number 5 eleven times, and thrice at number 6 – he had his most success at number 5, averaging 35 at it.
However, when the time for the crucial matches came – in the two ODIs vs Australia – Dravid sent him at number 4 in just the early overs of the match, feeding him to Mitchell Starc who was moving the ball at high pace under friendly conditions, instead of sending KL Rahul, who is better equipped to face such bowling because of his experience as an opener, of Ravindra Jadeja or Axar Patel, the left-handers in the side, over him to maybe just push Starc off his rhythm by breaking the series of right-handers.
India under Rohit-Dravid have poorly, and disappointingly, been inflexible at times – in all three formats – and these were the instances when they needed to show more flexibility by pushing SKY down and promoting the likes of KL Rahul and Hardik Pandya or Jadeja.
And it was baffling to see that despite having observed what happened in the first ODI, Dravid sent SKY at number 4 when Starc was at his best with the new ball. That is certainly not the way to utilize SKY’s abilities of having a quick start to his innings against spinners and then demolishing pacers when the ball has lost a bit of its shine.
This is still the start of SKY’s ODI career – one which India hopes gets success quickly as the World Cup approaches.
With Pant and Iyer out for indefinite periods of time, the matches and months after the IPL will be really crucial for SKY and India’s ODI plans.
