Winning Was Not Enough: The Suryakumar Lesson and the Case for Building Captains

Consider the facts, because they are remarkable. A man takes charge of India’s T20 side after a World Cup triumph and, over the next two years, loses just eight of fifty-two matches. He surrenders not a single bilateral series. He lifts the Asia Cup, then defends the T20 World Cup on home soil, making India the first side to win three global titles in the shortest format. His reward, in June 2026, is to be removed as captain and dropped from the squad altogether.

That is the Suryakumar Yadav story in a paragraph, and it ought to give the whole cricketing world pause.

Let the selectors’ case be put fairly first, because it is not a foolish one. His form with the bat had collapsed — a wretched IPL, a run of low scores stretching back well over a year, a once-feared strokemaker reduced to a walking wicket. The committee spoke of planning for the two-year cycle to the next World Cup, of building for the future rather than the past. A captain’s runs cannot dry up forever without consequence, and a selector who plans only for tomorrow morning is no selector at all. None of that is unreasonable.

And yet the sacking tells a deeper story than one man’s batting average — a story not about him, but about us. India has, for two decades, treated captaincy as something you hand to whoever is in form and snatch back the moment his form dips. We do not develop leaders; we discover them, usually by accident, and then cling to them until they break. When a Dhoni or a Kohli or a Rohit is in the room, this works beautifully, and we congratulate ourselves on a system we never actually built. The trouble announces itself only when the well runs dry, and then we are left doing precisely what we have just done: removing a World Cup-winning captain in a hurry and hoping his replacement turns out to have been a leader all along.

That is the wake-up call. We have been spoiled. Three once-in-a-generation captains arrived in succession — each with the rare gift of making ten other men play above themselves — and somewhere along the way we began to assume the next one would simply turn up, fully formed, exactly when required. That is not a plan. It is a lottery we have been fortunate to keep winning, and lottery tickets have a habit of eventually losing.

Consider, for a moment, what the job actually is. The captaincy of the Indian cricket team is, by any honest measure, among the most scrutinised and consequential positions in the country — second only, many would only half-joke, to the office of the Prime Minister. A billion people hold an opinion on it. It carries the mood of a nation on a given evening. And yet, for all that weight, not one serious, structured effort has ever been made to find and nurture the man who holds it. The most important leadership role in Indian sport has been filled, for as long as anyone can remember, the way one fills a raffle — by drawing a name and hoping. That a position of such importance has never once been approached with a system is not a small oversight. It is the oversight.

The error beneath all of it is a confusion about what captaincy actually is. We treat it as a coronation — the prize handed to the best batsman, or the senior pro, or the man the cameras like. It is nothing of the sort. Captaincy is a craft, separate from the craft of batting or bowling, and a distinct one: reading a game as it shifts beneath you, managing a dressing room of egos and anxieties and twenty-year-olds, communicating with clarity when the match is on fire, knowing the laws of the game cold, and carrying the board and the media and a billion opinions without losing your own. A magnificent batsman who cannot do these things is a magnificent batsman. He is not, automatically, a captain.

So is there a way to build leaders rather than wait for them? There is, and it is not complicated — only neglected.

It begins with identification. Long before a man is in the senior side, the future leaders are visible to anyone watching closely: not always the best player, but the one the others instinctively turn to, the one who organises, who steadies, who is unafraid to make the unpopular call. We find fast bowlers at fifteen and build them for a decade. There is no reason on earth we cannot do the same with captains.

Then comes the deliberate work, over years and not weeks. Put the chosen few through a genuine apprenticeship in leadership. Teach man-management — the art of getting the best from a senior who has been dropped, a debutant who is terrified, a star who is sulking. Teach conflict management, because a dressing room is not a postcard of harmony but a room full of ambitious men competing for the same places, and a captain who cannot defuse a feud or absorb a grievance will watch a team quietly come apart in his hands. Hone communication until a captain can deliver a plan in the dressing room and a verdict in the press conference with equal command — and train him, specifically, to address the press, to hold his line under a hostile microphone, to say what must be said and protect what must be protected, because in this country the press conference is a contest in its own right. Test them on strategy, relentlessly: simulated run chases, pressure scenarios, field-setting under the clock, decisions drilled until they become instinct. Challenge them with case studies — the real captaincy dilemmas of the past, the famous decisions and the infamous ones — and make them argue what they would have done, and why, until judgement becomes a muscle rather than a guess. And — a small thing that is forever overlooked — make them learn the laws properly, because a captain who fumbles an over-rate, a review or a field restriction at the death has handed the opposition an extra man. These things can be taught at the academy, in domestic cricket, in real captaincy of India A and the leadership group, in a structured ladder that produces a ready leader before the crisis rather than during it.

None of this denies that leadership carries an innate spark you cannot manufacture in a classroom. Not every cricketer can be made into a Dhoni, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of folly. But a raw leader can be sharpened enormously, and the difference between a captain who has been built for ten years and one thrown the keys in a panic is the difference we have just watched play out.

Suryakumar Yadav deserves to leave the captaincy with his head high; his record is among the finest any Indian captain has owned, and the manner of his exit reflects on the system far more than on him. The lesson is not his to learn. It is ours. The next great leader of Indian cricket should not have to emerge by happy accident, the way the last three did. We should be building him right now — quietly, patiently, years before we need him — so that the next time a World Cup-winning captain has to go, his successor is not a gamble, but a man we have been preparing all along.

It must be done by the system, and not left to chance. We have trusted to luck for the better part of fifty years and dressed it up as tradition, and luck has been kind. But the most important job in Indian sport cannot rest forever on the hope that greatness will keep arriving unbidden, exactly when required. Greatness, given a system, can be built. It is long past time we started building it.