Nos. 16-14: Nicholas Pooran, Faf du Plessis, Suryakumar Yadav

Scream for me, Dallas: Pooran set the inaugural MLC final alight with a lightning-quick hundred © Sportzpics

No. 16, Nicholas Pooran

by Deivarayan Muthu
If Kieron Pollard, Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine are first-generation T20 legends from Trinidad and Tobago, Pooran is the next-generation short-format superstar from the region. Like his seniors, Pooran has been there and done that in every T20 league around the world.

A powerful left-hand batter who has no real weakness against both pace and spin, and a safe wicketkeeper, Pooran's USP is hitting sixes on demand. In 2024 he clattered 170 sixes, 65 more than Heinrich Klaasen, the next best on the list. Nobody has hit more sixes in a calendar year in T20 cricket; not even his mentor Pollard, or the Universe Boss, Chris Gayle.

Power of this magnitude wasn't apparent in his early years, especially when he was repeatedly beaten by Narine's mystery spin in a Super Over full of dots in the 2014 CPL.

In 2015, Pooran was in a car crash and the resulting injuries threatened to end his career before it had got off the ground. At one point the doctors weren't sure if he would be able to play cricket again. But after two surgeries, rehab and therapy, he miraculously returned to action after almost two years out of it, and proved his fitness by even keeping wicket.

In his first major tournament back from injury, he smashed 217 runs in eight innings at a strike rate of almost 200 for Barbados Tridents in CPL 2016. It paved the way for a T20I debut for West Indies in the same year, and for franchise gigs around the world thereafter. Every league, from the IPL to T10, queued up for Pooran.

His versatility with the bat - he can slot in anywhere from No. 1 to No. 7 - makes him a dangerous player in these leagues. Throw in his keeping and leadership skills and you have a dream T20 package.

That package made its way to the IPL in 2019, when Punjab Kings snapped him up for Rs 4.2 crore (about US$575,000). It then rolled over to Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2022, before finding a home at Lucknow Super Giants.

Pooran established himself as LSG's middle-order mainstay in 2023 and 2024, which prompted the franchise into signing him as their top retention at Rs 21 crore ($2.5 million) ahead of this year's IPL.

With Bravo having retired and Pollard and Narine on their last laps, Pooran, 29, is now the West Indian poster boy of T20 cricket.

Career high: Pooran has hit three hundreds in the CPL, including a sub-50-ball effort, but it's hard to look past his 40-ball century for MI New York in the 2023 MLC final in Dallas. Though MLC didn't have T20 status at the time, Pooran himself rates that unbeaten 137 off 55 as his best T20 innings. A whopping 118 of those runs came via fours and sixes.

Faf du Plessis is one of only two batters to score 600 runs a season for two different franchises - RCB and CSK © AFP/Getty Images

No. 15, Faf du Plessis

by Shashank Kishore
When du Plessis made his debut against Australia in Adelaide in 2012, it looked like South Africa had uncovered a genuine stonewaller. Thirteen years on, he continues to evolve. He is a standout example of how to redefine fitness, athleticism and innovation in T20 batting - at nearly 41, when many of his peers have transitioned to roles as pundits and coaches.

Many ageing stars have found it difficult to adapt to the evolving demands of T20 cricket after their international retirements. Du Plessis, however, is an outlier. His finest years in the format have been since his retirement in 2021, most notably in the IPL, where he has been a sterling performer for Chennai Super Kings and Royal Challengers Bengaluru.

In 2021, du Plessis finished as the second-highest run-scorer in the IPL, forging a dynamic opening partnership with Ruturaj Gaikwad that played a key role in CSK's march to their fourth championship title. The following year he was appointed captain of RCB, a brave call given he had retired from internationals. The decision proved to be a masterstroke; du Plessis led the team to the playoffs in two out of three seasons.

In his first two years with RCB, 2022 and 2023, he dominated the run charts, comfortably outpacing and outscoring their talisman, Virat Kohli. In 2024 both men elevated their games and reinvented themselves as powerplay powerhouses.

This transformation coincided with RCB's playoff run that year, which came as the coda to six consecutive wins at the back end after they lost seven of their first eight matches. Du Plessis' newfound ability to handle spin better, an area that had troubled him between 2017 and 2021, when his strike rate against spin was just 115.80, was particularly notable. After 2021, that figure soared to an impressive 137, showcasing his evolution as a batter.

That confidence from his IPL run with RCB had a spin-off effect in the Caribbean, where he led St Lucia Kings to their first CPL title. It was no coincidence that du Plessis was also their second-highest run-getter in the competition. That run boosted his stocks ahead of the 2025 IPL auction, where he was signed by Delhi Capitals and was named their vice-captain prior to the season.

As a T20 batter du Plessis has displayed impressive consistency - he hit 1000 or more runs each year between 2022 and 2024, while striking at over 140. In 2023 and 2024, his strike rate was about 150 and above. At one point in the first of those three years, his roaring T20 form briefly made Cricket South Africa contemplate the possibility of introducing single-format contracts to allow players like du Plessis come back.

Though the door was left open, he didn't go down that route, though he continued to boost the T20 landscape in his home country by leading Jo'burg Super Kings to the playoffs in the SA20 each of their first three seasons.

Career high:
CSK didn't make the playoffs for the first time ever in 2020. Du Plessis led a sensational turnaround the following season, when they went on to win their fourth title. He amassed 633 runs, the second highest in the season. One of his standout performances came in the final that year, where he made a crucial 86 off 59 balls, laying the foundation for the win.

Suryakumar Yadav has scored 17% of his T20 runs in the V behind the wicket © PTI

No. 14, Suryakumar Yadav

By Karthik Krishnaswamy
Who's the real Mr. 360?

The nickname belongs to AB de Villiers, and it instantly evokes images of his daredevil scoops and ramps off fast bowlers, but did he really earn it, if you were to look at things, well, quantitatively?

Make no mistake, de Villiers was a wonder in the V behind the wicket, scoring, as per ESPNcricinfo's logs, 763 T20 runs in the fine-leg and fine-third sectors of the field, at a strike rate of 191.70. Pretty impressive, right? Well, yes, but with a cut-off of 500 runs in those zones, 27 batters have better strike rates.

On top of that list sits Suryakumar, with 1367 runs in the reverse V (that's at least 17% of all his T20 runs - keep in mind that ESPNcricinfo has no record of scoring zones for most domestic games outside the big leagues - as compared to 8% for de Villiers) at a strike rate of 253.61.

De Villiers hit 17 sixes in the reverse V. Suryakumar has hit 83. No one comes remotely close, with KL Rahul and Jos Buttler a distant second and third, with 38 and 37 respectively.

Suryakumar owns the V behind the wicket, and has so many ways of accessing it. He can walk across his stumps to scoop and sweep over fine leg. If the bowler sees him moving and shifts his line wider, he can reverse-scoop and go fine on the off side. He can bend over backwards to ramp and uppercut short balls. And perhaps most astonishingly, he can twirl his wrists clockwise against full balls and turn a shot that starts off looking like a cover drive into an aerial slice behind point.

The V behind the wicket is only 90 out of 360 degrees; what makes Suryakumar unstoppable is his range of shots all around the wicket. He can flick effortlessly off his legs and clear the boundary anywhere in the arc from backward square leg to long-on, and he has a unique method of leaning back to loft good-length balls over long-off and extra cover, ending up with his front leg in the air. He sweeps and reverse-sweeps spin better than most Indian batters, and he's adept at using his feet to drive and whip.

For all these gifts, Suryakumar is something of a late bloomer. In his first stint at Mumbai Indians, he was once omitted from their Champions League squad as one of several injured players, only to mysteriously appear in a concurrent Under-22 tournament and score 182 not out.

He then went to Kolkata Knight Riders, where he showed glimpses of his ability behind the wicket, but was mostly confined to a lower-order role. After four seasons there, he returned to MI, where, at the age of 27, he finally got a run of games in the top order.

He hasn't looked back since, and has only become better with age, his season-by-season IPL strike rates jumping from the 130s in 2018 and 2019 to the 140s in the next three years, and then past 160 in 2023 and 2024. Suryakumar's India performances can sometimes overshadow his immense IPL record - four of his six T20 hundreds have come in international cricket - but there's little doubt that he's among the league's most feared batters, no matter which phase he's batting in and which style of bowling he's facing.

Career high: He walked in with MI at 31 for 2 in a chase of 174 against Sunrisers Hyderabad last year, and that soon became 31 for 3. Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Pat Cummins were moving the ball prodigiously under the Wankhede lights, and Suryakumar failed to put bat to the first three balls he faced. When he got off the mark with a straight drive for four, MI had scored their first runs off the bat in 21 balls. When Cummins returned to the attack, he played out four watchful dots and a single. All this was contained in an unbeaten 51-ball 102 that took MI to victory with 16 balls to spare. These were the unusual bits. The rest was pure Suryakumar.

Stats in factfile sidebars are for all T20 matches, minus internationals, and current as up to the start of the 2025 IPL. League wins cover tournaments of four teams and above, and include seasons where the player appeared in at least one match for the winning team

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