If Virat Kohli is the bristling matador of modern cricket, Surya Kumar Yadav is its slouching five-o'clock shadow. Given his spectacular hitting, his crease presence isn't flamboyant. For a mayhem artist, there is a business-like calculation to his batting manner.
It isn't clear that he gets enough time at the crease in the prime overs. The three players who come before him in India's current T20I (T20 International) batting order are converted long-form batters of great all-round ability across formats, but they aren't T20 specialists. Their instinct is to bat long, which means they tend to avoid risk and work balls around in the early overs till a loose ball presents itself. SKY is not a prodigy: he's 32, not that much younger than Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli and a couple of years older than KL Rahul, but in this format and his company, they seem to bat like uncles.
To understand the difference between him and them, it's worth comparing two pairs of boundaries: Kohli's sixes in the penultimate over of the Pakistan match, and Yadav's sixes in the last over of the Indian innings against Zimbabwe. Kohli's shots are magical. The magic consists of near-impossible variations played on orthodox shots by a Test titan in the service of urgency. The first is essentially a straight drive for six off a chest-high ball; the second, a pick up shot, wanded over the long-leg boundary, is nearly as wonderful but at a lower level of impossibility. Kohli takes some liberties with length but plays the line.
Now consider Yadav's efforts. A full ball a yard outside the off-stump is flipped over the square leg boundary for six. A second full toss bowled wider is bent even finer over long-leg. Yadav completes the shot eyeing a point of contact in the region of silly point as the ball goes into orbit behind him. It's a new take on the no-look sixer. It's a circus trick, not a cricket shot if, by cricket, you mean Test cricket. The likelihood of carrying it off is low and the risk of getting out is high. It makes no long-form sense. Even if you're good enough to pull it off, in a game where you have days to play out, you can afford to play percentage cricket without damaging your team's chances. Only this isn't Test cricket.
To bat at the rate that Yadav does in T20 Internationals is nearly like hitting a four every other ball. Since not every bid to score a boundary succeeds, this suggests that he tries to hit boundaries four or five times every over. That's closer to the attitude of a batter in baseball than cricket. In baseball, if you don't get the ball away, you strike out or are run out. This is not the case even in this hyper-compressed cricketing format, but a T20 virtuoso like Yadav sees every unattacked ball as a little death. Which, in this format, it is. Better to perish trying to hit a four than survive by nurdling singles.
India's Big Three often nurdle their way through half the innings before Yadav gets a look in, and even if one of them anchors the innings into the 'death overs', nurdling limits the team's run horizon. To be cavalier in T20 cricket is, paradoxically, to play in the optimal way. It is prudence that is extravagant because it wastes precious currency, the batting side's limited quota of deliveries. Surviving without scoring freely is a bit like keeping your beedi lit with hundred rupee spills.
This is not to single out India's top order for criticism; Kane Williamson and Steve Smith, great batsmen both, play T20 cricket like Kohli and Sharma. All of them are shaped by Test cricket's rational preference for accumulation over all-out attack. It's hard to purge the common sense of long-form batting (not giving your wicket away) to adapt yourself to T20's imperative (scoring boundaries). Between the sensible moderation of 'finding the gaps' and the mad ambition of muscling the ball into spaces that don't exist within the Newtonian universe of line, length and conventional shot-making, lies a chasm that's hard to cross when batters switch formats.
But it can be crossed. Even this infant format produces revered ancestors. The obvious example is AB de Villiers. It's impossible for a spectator to understand how a sporting genius goes about his business, but de Villiers' ability to switch from conventional Test batting to T20's 360-degree tandav shows that it can be done. Still, even de Villiers' T20I strike rate is ordinary compared to Yadav's. The incentives for batters in the two formats are so differently aligned that it will likely remain hard for the twain to meet in the one body.
As the logic of the format is explored by batters in T20's proliferating leagues, it's inevitable that they will produce specialists who embody the incentives of the short game. Our expectation of cricketers in differing formats will diverge and so, in time, will our vocabularies. Careless Test batters will continue to sky the ball; T20's virtuosos will SKY it.
Mukul Kesavan is a writer based in Delhi. His most recent book is 'Homeless on Google Earth' (Permanent Black, 2013).
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.