As of now, there are 31 men's cricketers whose last match in a particular international format has been a win in the final of a World Cup or a World Test Championship. Ten of them are active international cricketers from the champion India side of the recently finished T20 World Cup. One is Lungi Ngidi, who hopes to make a comeback after he won the World Test Championship with South Africa last year. Of the 20 others, 16 were non-captains, of whom only Sulieman Benn and Sreesanth didn't retire shortly after the title win and can be considered dropped.
Of the remaining four who were captains, Imran Khan (1992 ODI World Cup), Michael Clarke (2015 ODI World Cup) and Rohit Sharma (2024 T20I World Cup) walked straight into retirement in that format.
That brings us to the unprecedented instance of a captain winning a world title in his last match, wanting to play more, and getting dropped altogether, just three months after that World Cup win. And this is no captain for captaincy's sake like Mike Brearley. Suryakumar Yadav is a pioneering T20 batter who deserves a place in the T20 Hall of Fame.
World Cup winners mostly either retire or continue playing. They earn that right. They rarely get dropped. Captains, never. India, though, currently fulfill both the conditions required for such an event to take place: a ridiculous abundance of talent pushing for nearly every spot in the side, and a ruthlessness and lack of sentimentality in those who are making the decisions. The selectors have dropped two other players - Kuldeep Yadav and Rinku Singh - from that World Cup squad of 15.
Suryakumar hasn't helped his own case with a lukewarm World Cup (242 runs at a strike rate of 136.72) and the IPL that followed (270 runs at 147.54). Still it is not unimaginable for a World-Cup-winning captain to survive this run. Then again, how do you justify keeping both Shreyas Iyer and Rajat Patidar, in their current form, out of international cricket? Patidar still can't get in despite playing a significant role as a batter and captain in two successive IPL titles for Royal Challengers Bengaluru.
Dropping Suryakumar is a brutal call from the selectors, but if you strip it of sentimentality and forget the lack of precedent, it can't be faulted. It is also, quite simply, just an extension of the ruthlessness this selection committee has displayed throughout its tenure. Once they tasted success at the 2024 T20 World Cup, they became increasingly able to withstand outside pressure.
And the success India have had in white-ball cricket has both vindicated the selectors' decisions and led to more ruthless calls, allowing them to look at the future and the next big event. India won the ODI Champions Trophy in 2025 under Rohit Sharma, but he lost the ODI captaincy to Shubman Gill, who is much likelier than Rohit to be close to or in his prime when the 2027 World Cup comes around. The next T20 World Cup is in 2028. India can now build towards it with a new captain. When they were not making such ruthless calls, India were left scrambling for a captain and coach for the 2024 T20 World Cup.
There is a sentimental argument made for giving a World-Cup-winning captain a farewell series, but that only sends mixed signals. Not getting a pre-announced farewell doesn't make Suryakumar's career any less exceptional than it is. Nor do the selectors have the right to tell a player when to retire. They have the right to drop him, and an etiquette-driven obligation to inform him before anyone else comes to know of it. They have duly done both.
Suryakumar might not be a happy man in the current moment, but if he has indeed played his last match for India he will retire with an excellent career during which he won two T20 World Cups, and had the selectors and the team management backing him enough to let him jump the queue in Tests and ODIs even though those calls didn't quite work out. If he hasn't already, in time he will realise the selectors did right by him. The amount of talent in Indian cricket left them no option.