The SKY is blue again Premium

The SKY is blue again

What do you do when you hit a trough? When what was once second nature has gone missing, not for a day or a week or a month, but for an entire year? When the runs dry up, when your signature strokes desert you, when the individual failures start to stack up even if, under you, the team is doing magical things?

Go back to the drawing board, for sure, but also work extra hard to keep negativity at bay, to disassociate yourself from the dangerous gremlins of self-doubt, right?

That’s easier said than done, of course. Not going back to the drawing board, because that’s what professional sportspersons do when they are confronted by rare failure. But how do you maintain the veneer of positivity when you know that you are letting yourself and the team down, no matter how patient and understanding they might be?

Suryakumar Yadav is nothing if not a proud individual, a proud captain, a proud leader of men. Even as he steered India from one victory to another, including an unbeaten run culminating in the Asia Cup crown in the Emirates in September, he must have hurt badly at not being able to contribute with the bat. His primary vocation is as a batter, which is what earned him the leadership role in the first place. “I don’t mind not scoring so long as the team wins,” is a very politically correct statement, but Suryakumar was fooling no one. He wanted badly to score, to leave his mark, to turn the clock back and to emerge as a more fearsome version of the marauding self that once ruled the T20 ecosystem.

And therefore, as 2025 segued into 2026, the 35-year-old found the equanimity to take failure in his stride, aware that there was nothing he could do to correct the past but also flush with the realisation that he would not allow the immediate past to define him. A new, exciting challenge awaited him in the new year – the opportunity to emulate Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Rohit Sharma and become only the third Indian captain to lift the T20 World Cup. That he would have the chance to do so on home turf – Dhoni’s success came in South Africa in 2007, Rohit’s in Barbados in 2024 – was an added fillip.

For the whole of 2025, it was as if someone answering to the name of Suryakumar Yadav, resembling him physically but batting as if he were an impostor, had replaced the original. Shots that once flew off his blade to the stands where the audiences were part excited and part fearful let him down badly. The patented pick-up shot went AWOL, the drives down the ground disappeared, the first sign of aggression often brought about his downfall. Suryakumar shrugged off those disappointments, maintaining his million-dollar smile and crooning that he was only ‘out of runs, not out of form’. But the more he espoused that theory, the more one felt that he was desperately trying to convince himself, more than the outside world, that that was indeed the case.