India captain Suryakumar Yadav had to manage expectations on and off the field while overseeing his team’s historic title-winning campaign at the recent ICC Men’s T20 World Cup. Suryakumar became just
the third Indian captain to win a T20 World Cup, and he has revealed a behind-the-scenes conversation he had with a teammate who became angry after being informed that he would be dropped for a particular fixture.
Axar Patel, who has become a mainstay in India’s limited-overs teams, missed a couple of matches during the 2026 T20 World Cup. He did not play the team’s inconsequential match against the Netherlands and was also not picked for the all-important clash with South Africa.
Suryakumar admitted that Axar was upset, and he apologised while explaining the reason.
“He (Axar) was very angry – and he should have been,” Suryakumar told The Indian Express. “He’s an experienced player; he leads a franchise. He should be angry. I apologised. I told him I made a mistake and I’m sorry, but it was a call for the team. It was a hard conversation. He took it in his stride, and we talked it through the next day.”
Axar was promptly brought back into the playing XI after India suffered a 76-run defeat to South Africa in their first match of Super 8 round which meant they needed to win their remaining two fixtures against Zimbabwe and West Indies to qualify for the semi-finals.
Suryakumar said the planning for the 2026 T20 World Cup began back in 2024, when he was handed the reins of the team. One of the first changes the team underwent was realising that they had to move on from their old brand of cricket and stop paying attention to personal milestones.
“We knew the way we played the 2024 T20 World Cup – that brand of cricket – won’t work going ahead. So, we decided: from hereon we will not pay attention to personal milestones, the goal is to win games,” he said.
“If you noticed, till the semifinals none of our players were top run-getters or top wicket-takers. But we qualified and kept winning. Every game, every player contributed. It was very important to spread this thing like a virus in the team from the start. We planted this team culture 18 months back,” he added.
