Suryakumar Yadav

Hard-hitting 360-degree batter Suryakumar Yadav has all the shots, including a few not in any textbook save the one written by AB de Villiers. He also has a yen for making batting look easy, as he showed during four golden years with Mumbai Indians starting in 2018, during which they won the IPL title twice, thanks in no small part to his 1700-plus runs at a strike rate of around 140.

He made 73 on his Ranji Trophy debut, for Mumbai in 2010, and the following season scored 754 from nine games, the most by anyone from his team. That tally included a double-century against Orissa in his third match of the season, and a hundred in the next. He capped the season with yet another hundred, in the Duleep Trophy. After a blip in 2012-13, he was back among the runs the next season, where he finished among Mumbai's top three run-getters.

Suryakumar spent four seasons with Kolkata Knight Riders, starting in their second IPL title-winning year, 2014, though with 608 runs from 54 games he didn't quite provide a foretaste of what he would go on to do with Mumbai Indians in the years that followed.

Suryakumar's first international came belatedly in 2021, whereupon he hooked the first ball he faced in a T20I, from Jofra Archer, for six. He produced two fifties in his first three T20Is, and the year after, made 117 off 55 in a game where India fell short in the face of a massive 215 by England.

- For the kind of explosive T20 batter has been since the 2018 IPL, Suryakumar Yadav had a quiet first few years in the tournament. He was part of the MI squad in the 2012 and 2013 seasons but played only one game, in which he was dismissed for a duck.

- In 2014, he was bought by KKR but they failed to get the best out of him by batting him as a finisher. He played four IPL seasons for them but did not score more than 200 runs in any of those.

- In the 2018 auction, MI bought Suryakumar back and he had his breakthrough season with 512 runs at a strike rate of 133.33. Since then, he has become a force at No. 3 for them and scored his maiden IPL century in 2023, when he amassed over 600 runs while striking at 181.13

- He took it to another level in 2025 when he had his best IPL season by scoring 717 runs with five half-centuries and a stunning average of 65.18 which also included 25-plus scores for all his 16 innings. He has won two titles with MI, in 2019 and 2020, and was among the top retentions for 2026.