Sanjay Manjrekar calls out Suryakumar Yadav's ‘dangerous tactic', tells him to be ‘careful’: ‘When the captain feels…’

Suryakumar Yadav might not have been scoring runs last year in T20Is, but 2026 has changed the luck completely around for the Indian captain. The right-handed batter has been in phenomenal touch, and the golden period started with the series against New Zealand. The 35-year-old started the T20 World Cup 2026 on the best note possible, hitting 84 not out against the USA, bailing the team out of trouble at the Wankhede Stadium. The 20-team competition has seen SKY adapt to the game's situation and play accordingly, even when that warrants a cautious approach.

However, former India batter Sanjay Manjrekar is not a fan of Suryakumar and Tilak Varma taking their own sweet time in getting going in the middle. He stated that the T20 format no longer merits a place for batters who want to play the anchor role.

India will begin its Super 8s campaign on Sunday with the match against South Africa in Ahmedabad. The defending champions won all their group-stage games, but their performance was far from complete. Both SKY and Tilak have also been criticised for not being able to get the boundaries in the middle overs phase. The same sentiment has now been echoed by Manjrekar as well.

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“There's something I'm seeing in Suryakumar Yadav, which I'm not liking too much. 77 for 6, India against USA at Wankhede. And Suryakumar Yadav had to change his game, which he did brilliantly. Just slowed down a little bit and then exploded and got a great score, player of the match and everything. Since then, I think he's taking that a bit too far. Against Pakistan, when India lost a couple of wickets, he really pulled down the shutters quite a lot,” Manjrekar said in a video he shared on Instagram.

“He and Tilak Varma, both playing slightly conservatively. And in the end, what happens is people like Hardik Pandya, Shivam Dube, and Rinku Singh are not really tapped into as resources as much. In T20 cricket, that's a dangerous thing to do, when a senior player or a captain feels that he's got to stay in, especially batting first,” he added.

‘Dangerous tactic’

Manjrekar said that the signs for the team would be no good if the captain had decided that there was a need for him to be mindful while batting, and he started to play the role of an accumulator. He said that, considering the depth within the Indian team, every batter can just look to tee off from ball number one.

“When you're setting targets of 200 plus, winning scores, if you have somebody in the top four who believes that he's the guy who's got to control the innings and make sure that he's the one who'll take India to a certain score, that is a very dangerous tactic. And considering that India have such fantastic players with Axar Patel at number eight or Washington Sundar at number eight, no batter must think like that,” said Manjrekar.

“He must trust the batters to come in after him and try and maximise returns every ball that he faces. When you have such depth in your batting, I don't think one batter, a single batter, should play in with this feeling that he's got to control the innings. That is the danger where you'll bat first and just not get enough runs on the board because you've just played too conservatively and there are wickets in hand, but you've not used your resources, and you've just got 180 runs against a strong chasing team. So, Surya has got to be careful about that,” he added.

In the T20 World Cup 2026, Suryakumar has so far been slow off the blocks, and the matches against Pakistan and the Netherlands also saw him just milking singles at the beginning of his innings. He is currently India's second-highest run-scorer in the tenth edition of the tournament, only behind Ishan Kishan.

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