Mumbai Indians star batter Suryakumar Yadav and wife Devisha Shetty welcomed a baby girl on Thursday. “With giggles, bows, and dreams to unfurl – we welcome our baby girl,” the Indian cricket team T20 captain wrote on Instagram. Suryakumar on Wednesday was not among the first batch of MI players who went to Raipur for the IPL 2026 team’s next match against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on Sunday. Yadav even captained MI in their last match against Lucknow Super Giants. MI and his teammate Deepak Chahar congratulated Yadav on the occasion.
Yadav has often credited his wife as having a great influence on his career. In fact, it was her matter-of-fact query that drove him to slog hard for a national call-up. Suryakumar Yadav, who is a T20 World Cup-winning captain, earlier couldn’t praise his “brutally honest” wife Devisha enough for shaping the man that he has become. It was in 2018 when Devisha asked Suryakumar a simple question: “If you want to play for India, how do you plan to do it?”
Eight years since that “brutally honest conversation”, Suryakumar led India to a successful T20 World Cup title defence in 2026.
“We got married in 2016 when I was still playing for KKR. Everything was going very smoothly. I was playing well, enjoying, and she looked at my journey and my routines till 2018 when I joined Mumbai Indians. I think we started doing things a little differently,” Suryakumar recalled during a podcast interview with ‘PTI Videos’.
“She told me that all those who played with you in age group cricket, a lot of them are now playing for India – what do you have in mind? I said: ‘Mujhe bhi India khelna hai (I want to play for India too)’. ‘Kaise kheloge’ (how do you plan to do it?), she asked.
“It was a nice little conversation with her, not an argument but a discussion. But yes, it was a discussion about how you can take one extra step forward in your endeavour. If I want to play for India and want to win games for India, how do I do it?” the 35-year-old revealed his career-changing tete-a-tete with his wife.
Once a decision about taking that extra step towards realising the ultimate goal was taken, some hard life choices were also on the cards, and as a couple Suryakumar and Devisha walked that path.
“We had to cut down on a lot of things – from diet to friends’ circles to weekends, rest on Saturday-Sunday, Monday to Friday work schedule – so we set the ball rolling and in 2018, I had a very good IPL season (512 runs) and also domestic cricket,” he said.
“That year, I got a chance to open for Mumbai Indians and I got runs too. Come 2019 and 2020, we kept doing the same thing and I was in a different mood. She saw that I had started enjoying it even more. 2020 was even better (480 runs as a finisher), and then in 2021 I got picked for India,” Suryakumar added.
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