The ink of the discussion of the victory in the T20 World Cup had not even dried when the white ball tour of Sri Lanka came up. If we look at Team India for the 3 T20 Internationals, it seems that a lot has changed after that World Cup victory. The most special thing is Suryakumar Yadav becoming the captain. After the World Cup, when Rohit Sharma retired, someone else had to become the captain, but at the age of about 34, Suryakumar Yadav was not a favorite in the list of contenders to become the captain.

Okay, he is the number 2 T20 batsman in the rankings and has been the captain of Team India 7 times in this format before (5 wins, 2 losses) but now when the team needed a 'long term' captain, the chances of him becoming the captain in this format at this 'old' age were not very high. And note – Suryakumar Yadav, who is currently the T20 captain of Team India, was not made captain by his IPL team. The captain of the IPL team is in the team but has not been made the 'captain'.

By the way, the interesting thing is that it is not only Ajit Agarkar's committee that has surprised people with such decisions of captaincy (in which the favourites were left behind and someone else won) – the history of cricket is full of such surprising decisions. If we don't go too far back, then in recent years the selection committee has been famous for taking many such decisions. See 5 such famous examples:

Tim Paine (Australia) : When Australia was reeling after the Sandpaper Gate ball-tampering case at Newlands in 2018, Cricket Australia made a big splash by appointing Tim Paine as the Test captain. Till then, he had played only 12 Test matches and that too not consecutively. Seniors like Usman Khawaja, Shaun Marsh and Nathan Lyon were the favourites in the list of contenders for the captaincy but Paine won. However, this experiment was not bad – he captained 23 Tests in 3 years, including the speciality of winning the Ashes in England for the first time in 18 years (in 2019) and pulled the team out of the crisis.

Aiden Markram (South Africa): This is also a story of 2018 and Markram was made the stand-in ODI captain by South Africa (after Faf du Plessis got injured in the middle of the ODI series against India in 2018) when he had played only 2 ODIs – even though he had played 7 international matches in total. At that time, there were seniors like Quinton de Kock, Hashim Amla, David Miller, JP Duminy and Kagiso Rabada in the team but he won the match. The failure of that series really hurt him but he bounced back.

MS Dhoni (India) : India's selectors have done this before in T20 cricket in 2007. Then they surprised everyone by making MS Dhoni the captain of the 2007 T20 World Cup team. When it was decided that seniors like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly were not available, the selectors put not only the most senior Yuvraj Singh but also Virender Sehwag and Harbhajan Singh on the back foot. What happened after this – everyone knows that history.

Gulbadin Naib (Afghanistan) : With only a month left for the 2019 World Cup to begin, Afghanistan removed Asghar Afghan, with whom the team was being prepared, and Gulbadin Naib became the new captain. Gulbadin was playing ODIs regularly but at this point, the captain who had been captaining all formats since 2015, not only was he removed, but everyone was surprised by ignoring the experience of Mohammad Shahzad, Mohammad Nabi, Rahma Shah and Daulat Zadran for this post. This decision proved to be very costly for the team.

Jason Holder (West Indies) : When he was made the Test captain in 2015 in place of Dinesh Ramdin, the truth is that his place in the Test team was not even confirmed. He played only 8 Tests in which he performed well with the bat (including 100 against England) and ball (16 wickets) but the selectors gave importance to the fact that he was the ODI captain then. Even then he got the Test captaincy at the age of just 23 and became the captain of a team with seniors like Craig Brathwaite, Ramdin, Marlon Samuels, Darren Bravo, Kemar Roach and Jerome Taylor. This experiment was not bad and in 2019, he defeated England 2-1 on his pitches while the most important thing was that he kept the team together in crisis.