Before becoming T20 superstar, Surya would ponder lening to Gully Boy hit ‘Apna time aayega’

Seldom has a star’s arrival in a World Cup as anticipated as Surya Kumar Yadav’s in the current T20 edition. There was never doubt about his talent, the wait was about him delivering on international cricket’s biggest stage. That ended at Perth on Sunday.
The stardust would scatter over a pacy bouncy pacer-friendly Perth pitch when no other Indian looked even remotely comfortable. Surya would shine all alone, and nearly drag India to a win.
Surya has had to wait till he is 30; and with the attention still scattered on Virat Kohli’s revival and Rohit Sharma’s first stint as a World Cup captain. The cricketing world outside was already ready, and if India were still blinking, they would now just stare, jaws-dropped, at a talent whose time has finally come.
Surya has been waiting for this for a long time.

.@surya_14kumar scored a cracking half-century & was our top performer from the first innings of the #INDvSA #T20WorldCup clash. 👌 👌 #TeamIndia
A summary of his knock 🔽 pic.twitter.com/vMwfHvrNkQ
— BCCI (@BCCI) October 30, 2022
In 2019, speaking to The Indian Express even as he stared at his food at a restaurant, he would mutter, “Do you know why I haven’t been selected yet for the Indian team? What more do you think I need to do?”
It turns out, nothing but what he has been doing thus far: scoring runs, silencing doubters, breaking down selection doors – and then charming the nation.But back then, doubts surfaced in his mind. Was he too late? Had the selection bus moved to the next batch of under-19 kids. “Am I that bad, is there something wrong,” he would ask his close friends.
The doubts remarkably weren’t erased the selectors or even peers but the fans. Be it airport, hotel, ground, Yadav used to say that he would hear one constant call, “When you are playing for Indian team”. Somedays, in his room he used to hear the Bollywood song ‘Apna time aayega’, and ponder.

In the meanwhile, he continued doing two things: scoring runs and helping his friends and family. When the pandemic hit, and a former Ranji Trophy team-mate was seriously ill, he would give Rs 5 lakhs for the treatment. Yadav helped another friend Javed Khan financially to set up a cricket academy. “Post Covid, things were getting tough for me and I wanted to open an academy. I wanted some money and I messaged Surya. He just transferred it,” Khan says.
His friends would joke about the colour of his hair and watches. His wife Devisha recently had said how he keeps rewinding old movies and keeps laughing out loud.
He loves his comic movies and shows like Hera Pheri and The Kapil Sharma Show. On phone calls, when the mood seizes him, he would fool around saying filmi dialogues. His favourite being the popular ‘Nonsense’ line from Singham.

None of his friends were surprised at his ballsy attitude at the crease. “He had a certain belief which none of us other players had even when young. I remember once he was sledged the Uttar Pradesh players, and he said, ‘wait and watch. I shall reverse hit the first ball and then launch one massive hit’. He did exactly that to smash a double hundred,” says Javed. Or in how he turned his anger at being dropped from Ranji team piling on the runs to storm back.
On Sunday, at Perth, he convinced the world, if there remained any rare doubters, of his talent.
Former India opener Gautam Gambhir, one of the early backers of Suryakumar’s talent at the IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders, would proclaim on Star Sports: “This is the best T20 knock ever an Indian”.
India were 49/5 and the top order was bounced out one one, after uncomfortable and awkward brief stays. Against Pakan, the issue wasn’t about survival but about runs. Here, the very survival seemed at stake. “Without him, India would have been bowled out under 100,” Ravi Shastri would say on air. In a low scoring game, his 68 came off 40 balls at a strike rate of 170.

There was one crucial difference to his way from his team-mates. They tried to get on top of the bounce, an attempt inevitably leading to failure with the steep tennis-ball bounce that Perth threw up.
Surya got under the ball, at unique angles, to tap the bouncing ball further along. It needed special skills, eyes, hands, wrs, and a big heart to do it his way. It was also very smart. A special tennis-style forehand off Kagiso Rabada that flew to the long-off boundary was a take-away moment. Or this one time when he shuffled across to lap-pull a pacy Anrich Nortje hard-length ball over fine-leg.
At the biggest stage in world cricket, he was India’s lone hero; the boy on the burning deck slashing away in style.