Suryakumar Yadav

Hard-hitter Suryakumar Yadav has all the shots, and a yen for making batting look easy, as he showed during four golden years with Mumbai Indians starting in 2018, during which they won the IPL title twice, thanks in no small part to his 1700-plus runs at a strike rate of around 140.

Yadav made 73 on his Ranji Trophy debut, for Mumbai in 2010, and the following season scored 754 from nine games, the most by anyone from his team. That tally included a double-century against Orissa in his third match of the season, and a hundred in the next. He capped the season with yet another hundred, in the Duleep Trophy. After a blip in 2012-13, he was back among the runs the next season, where he finished among Mumbai's top three run-getters.

Yadav spent four seasons with Kolkata Knight Riders, starting in their second IPL title-winning year, 2014, though with 684 runs from 60 games he didn't quite provide a foretaste of what he would go on to do with Mumbai Indians in the years that followed.

Eleven years after his first-class debut, Yadav's first international came belatedly in 2021, whereupon he hooked the first ball he faced in a T20I, from Jofra Archer, for six. He produced two fifties in his first three T20Is, and the year after, made 117 off 55 in a game where India fell short in the face of a massive 215 by England.