Suryakumar Yadav’s swat-flick against Josh Hazlewood is a shot all his own and bends cricketing logic to his whims

As is often the case with Surya, everything happened in both a blur and ultra-slow motion. The upper body got down and up with the movement of the ball, like a snake-charmer enticing his pet cobra, before bat met ball on an incline and scooped it to the vacant expanses on the leg-side with the swirl of his wrists (not a furious whirr, but a simple twist).

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The bat intersected rather than met the ball, just below the knees, yet it contacted the blade in full, an inch beneath the sticker. Surya then used the pace on the ball to loft it over the arc between fine and square leg, the body pirouetting towards the ball’s path.

The follow-through is complete, one of the keys in making the shot work. The weight is more or less evenly distributed (60 percent on the back foot and 40 percent on the front), as the broadcasters’ graph showed.

The shift of weight to the back foot is both seamless and incremental. Had the ball bounced more, he would have taken the front foot off the ground and lowered his body further to maintain balance and get under the ball. But here the impact was when the ball was just below the knee-roll. The ball would have climbed over the knees had Surya waited any second longer. But he knew the ripest moment to intervene.

A vast oeuvre of strokes could capture the absurdity of Surya’s angle-breaking methods. The one-legged scythe over extra cover, the spine-breaking ramp, the open-bodied cover-drive, or the falling scoop. The hybrid flicks, though, are his signature, strokes that he has defined as much as the strokes have defined him. Few batsmen have redefined the scope and range of one single stroke than Surya to the flick.

If Rohit Sharma has wielded it like a canvas-artist’s brushstroke, Virat Kohli brandished it with a smouldering masculinity. Surya uses it with an acrobat’s dexterity. He has infused the stroke with principles of the glance, pull and scoop. The one he executed against Hazlewood, en route an unbeaten 39 in the abandoned game at Canberra on Wednesday that allayed fears of his drought of runs, was an improvised scoop-flick.

Conventional logic says that the straighter the bat is when meeting the ball, the brighter the chances of making the sweetest contact. Angles and curves narrow the meeting points. But Surya’s angled bat makes crisper sounds than the vertical flex of most others.

Shot and the man

Few batsmen have redefined the scope and range of one single stroke than Suryakumar Yadav to the flick. (BCCI Photo)

The flick must not have traversed weirder angles than when executed by him. The great-flick virtuosos Mohammad Azharuddin, Saeed Anwar and VVS Laxman coaxed the ball anywhere from mid-on to fine leg, picking it from anywhere they chose, but largely kept the ball along the ground. The all-shot master Sachin Tendulkar’s aerial flicks used to travel the paths of Surya’s but only when the balls were fuller and on leg-stump.

He has essayed this stroke and the variants of it, most breathtakingly the self-described supla stroke, where he paddles the ball over the fine-leg fielder on one-leg and ends up in a frog-jump pose on the follow-through, countless times. But the novelty remains and the bowlers have not discovered a solution to stop him from performing these.

“I used to practise every stroke a thousand times in the nets, until I felt that I could execute them in the middle of a competitive game,” Surya once told this newspaper. Even if he does not always time it perfectly, the ball’s pace and blinding bat-speed will mean even mis-hits could travel the full journey.

But to imagine the stroke needs ingenuity. Most batsmen honed in classical ways would be content to work around the natural framework of their game. Kohli is a textbook example. But Surya retooled his game completely to strike gold in the T20 format. And he makes it sound simple.

The key, he once told Star Sports, is that he always looks to get in line with the ball. “If you miss the line of the ball, it is very difficult to play the shot. If it is in the arc, I will go for it, whether there is a fielder in the arc. I don’t see them at all, they are completely irrelevant because I know that if I middle the ball, it will fly over them,” he explained.

Surya also detailed the genesis of his predilection for the zone (the SKY zone), where only two fielders could prowl, thus giving him more access to find the fence. “In schools with friends, we used to play on hard cement tracks. The off-side boundary would be around 20-30 metres away from the track and the leg-side one used to be around 90-100 metres. The bowlers kept bowling into the body, targeting the area between the knee and neck. So you need to score runs as well as ensure that the ball doesn’t hit you. That is how I started playing these strokes,” he narrated.

Perhaps, that is how Suryakumar thinks when he unfurls the stroke, that he is playing in a backyard with friends, transporting the audience into a theatre of the absurd, instilling the angles of the game with a wax-like elasticity.