Suryakumar Yadav on The Catch: “I knew that I hadn’t touched the rope …”

Kapil Dev remains India’s most supreme natural athlete to have ever played the game – he didn’t run; he waltzed, he didn’t catch; he serenely pouched blurs. Sreesanth remains the most enigmatic talented Indian cricketer, an emotionally-vulnerable man almost fatally attracted to self-destruction. He catches, but it induces even atheists to contemplate praying. Suryakumar, a modern-marvel in the way he bats and works on his fitness with a private chef often travelling on tours for him, was one of the three best placed Indians on that field, alongside Ravindra Jadeja and Virat Kohli, to even contemplate the possibility of that catch.

It’s in that contemplation that great catches achieve immortality. For Kapil to run 20 yards to grab that game-turning catch of the best batsman in the world Viv Richards wasn’t a big deal. It lies in the fact that he chose to go for it. Yashpal Sharma running in from the boundary was probably closer to it as Kris Srikkanth would once say, Kapil kept saying and gesturing pretty early in the piece that it was his. Or as the current coach Rahul Dravid once described that catch perfectly: “It was incredible that he went for it. You take a lot of that kind of catches in practice but to replicate it in the final against the opposing team’s best batsman, you can have some doubt in going for it. It was incredible that he went for it. That’s Kapil Dev.”

Kapil had no doubts. No self-doubts, nothing about the swirling wind, nothing about who the batsman was, nothing but his eye on the ball. Just before that over, as a captain he had had second doubts about giving one more over to the genial medium pacer Madan Lal, but was convinced otherwise by the bowler who said he would get Richards. A short ball outside off and Richards swivelled into his famous pull, but was pulled down by the greatest all-round cricketing talent India has ever produced. Kapil didn’t even celebrate it and would perhaps have quietly walked back if not for the fans who had charged out and Yashpal fiercely hugging him.

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Sreesanth came from the opposite spectrum on that contemplation scale. Of the three, taking in account the fielder and the nature of the catch, Sreesanth’s was pretty difficult. Kapil had to run, Surya had to run and balance – and there was no time for any dangerous self-defeating doubts and the pressure of oh-god-what-if-I-drop-this thoughts to invade the headspace. Sreesanth had to cope with that as he waited for those 4 seconds to end.

From the moment Misbah-ul-Haq unwisely chose to lap a slower-ball, there was no question of anyone else taking that catch. No one else was close. Sreesanth was carefully placed there, not for a catch but to be hidden from any such eventuality. “Dhonibhai put me there I guess because he didn’t want the ball to come to me!” Sreesanth once told this newspaper with a lovely smile. “Even I wasn’t thinking about any catches; I just wanted to make sure I didn’t give any extra run as there was no one behind me at short fine-leg. I think I was quite blank during that over.”

The ball wobbled up from the Pakistani’s blade and Sreesanth would in hindsight throw up a meme he read later, “Misbah forgot that there is a Malayali in every corner. Only I would change that Malayali to Indian!”. So there he stood, hands flapping away after the initial backtrack. Once at some event, Dhoni would say with a smile that when he turned and saw it was Sreesanth there, he had lost hope. It could be the sentiment shared by many Indians on that night. But the palms managed to press together and cup as the ball landed. “It popped up slightly if you remember, and I grabbed it on the second attempt.” And he would spread his hands and roar.

For 7 seconds, Suryakumar had no time to think about the end result. He had to rush at full speed, he had to somehow skirt away from the boundary and hold his balance but still have his gaze at the white round thing that was sinking down from the skies.

India’s fielding coach Dilip had assigned Surya, Kohli, Axar and Jadeja, the job to guard ‘hotspot areas’, SKY would tell the Express. Hotspots were where there was maximum chance of ball coming to the fielder, and players would practice in specific fielding positions.

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“I had practiced the same catch at different grounds, depending on winds. I was standing a bit wide yesterday because Hardik and Rohit bhai had put a field for a wide yorker, and Miller had hit straight,” Surya recalls. “The ball was travelling straight in fact. My mind was clear that kaise bhi karke pakad he lena hai. Rohit bhai usually never stands at long on, but at that moment he was standing there. So when the ball travelled, for a second I looked for him and looked towards me. I ran and the aim was to catch the ball. Had he (Rohit) been closer, I would have thrown the ball towards him but he wasn’t.”

Surya says those 4-5 seconds are beyond imagination now, and there are more than 1000 unread watsapp messages on his phone. “The catch is all over social media. I’m grateful that I was there in that five seconds of the play.
When I pushed the ball and when I took the catch, I knew that I hadn’t touched the rope. The only thing I was cautious about was that when I threw the ball back inside the ground, my feet doesn’t touch the rope. I knew it was a fair catch,” he stresses.

As Dravid said of Kapil’s catch, to train for it is one thing, but to replicate it in the last over of the World Cup final to end the knock from a marauding David Miller and to put himself between himself and India’s defeat is quite something.

There were so many variables where it could have gone pear shaped. If the run wasn’t a sprint, he would never have got there. If the feet didn’t listen to his brain, he would have trampled on the boundary rope – even now many fans are sweating over zoomed-in ultra-close-up shots. If the hands were nervy, the ball would have popped out. And all this was just half the job: the run, the hand-stretch, and the dancing feet.

Unlike Kapil’s and Sreesanth’s, he couldn’t just clasp his palms over the ball and be done with it. His brain now had to work overtime to think beyond the bubbling emotions: to pop up the ball, get over the line and jump back to the legal side and catch.

The moment he did all that, the pupils of his eyes are worth a million close-up replays. Not his feet. His eyes widen into indescribable glee at what he has done. Kapil’s toothy grin flashed at Lord’s. Sreesanth’s relief-tinged growl reverberated in Durban and it’s that wide-eyed bliss of Surya at Barbados that would linger on for years. Three catches, three World Cups, and to borrow a line from the football commentator Peter Drury, sport takes human beings to places they can’t even imagine. Sometimes, just sometimes, reality beats dreams as it did on all these three occasions.