Two innings. Two first-ball ducks. The alarm bells are ringing for Suryakumar Yadav. Twice in the ongoing ODI series between India and Australia, Suryakumar has been dismissed by Mitchell Starc for a first-ball duck. It is but an extension of his struggles in one-day cricket, a format which he has strangely not yet cracked given his remarkable success in T20Is where he’s quickly risen to become the world’s best batter.
A cursory glance at his ODI and T20I numbers will be enough to give an indication of the massive gulf.
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1675 runs in 46 innings at an average of 46.52 and a strike-rate of 175.76 since making his T20I debut in July 2021. He has three centuries and 13 fifties as well.
In a stark contrast, he has managed 433 runs from 20 ODI innings at an average of 25.47. He has two half-centuries – the last of which came 14 innings before, back in February 2022.
With the ODI World Cup few months away, there will be concerns but India head coach Rahul Dravid isn’t worried.
Dravid in fact claims that Suryakumar’s T20I success is due to his rich IPL experience and that he hasn’t played enough one-day cricket.
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“Not really concerned about Surya. He got two very good balls. One of things about Surya is that he is learning the 50-overs game. The T20 is slightly different. In T20, he has played 10 years of IPL,” Dravid told reporters on Tuesday.
“He (Surya) has played a lot of T20 cricket. He has played a lot of high pressure T20 games. Even though he has played a lot of T20 cricket I think he has not played a lot of one-day cricket. We need to give him some time and be patient with it. We certainly see the upside of him doing well,” he added.
Dravid also rued the absence of Shreyas Iyer who has been ruled out from the series due to a back issue. “Obviously. it is unfortunate for Shreyas to get injured. He is probably one of those guys who would bat at No.4 and given a lot of time at that position. If you notice we have stuck to the people in positions. For two years leading into this run, there is a lot of T20 cricket played and we did not have a lot of one-day cricket and if there are injuries and all that, we do have options,” he said.
With the third and final match against Australia on Wednesday, India would have played nine ODIs in 2023. Dravid says the team has managed to achieve what they set out to from these games.
“We have to a large extent. We have got a lot more clarity at the end of these nine games irrespective of what happens tomorrow. We need to keep building on that clarity,” he said.
He continued, “For us it is now the different playing XI combinations and just ensuring that we play different combinations at times just to ensure that we are able to do that in the World Cup and we are not surprised by anything in the World Cup.”
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