Yuvraj Singh, India’s mid-over batting lynchpin in two World Cup triumphs, on Monday has announced his instant retirement from international cricket.
Accompanied by his spouse and mom, the all-rounder informed journalists about his choice at a town hotel near the Wankhede Stadium where India lifted its last World Cup trophy in 2011.
He said that he has now decided to move on and cricket has given him everything. “and that’s why I am standing here”. He said this after being reduced to tears by a video which showed the highlights of his career.
Yuvraj said that it has been a love-hate relationship. He played the last of his 304 one-day internationals two years ago and was the main cog in India’s 2007 Twenty20 World Cup triumph and four years later was a World Cup player-of-the-tournament.
Yuvraj was one of the cleanest strikers of the ball in the game in his heyday-as England’s Stuart Broad found during the 2007 World Twenty20 when he was bludgeoned for six sixes in one over.
He was part of the Indian Premier League’s victorious 2019 Mumbai Indians team, the world’s most glamorous and cash-rich T20 league, but played in the campaign in just four games.
After a long battle with a rare germ cell cancer in his lungs, Yuvraj made an emotional return to the game in 2012 and performed the last of his 40 tests that year. With three hundred and eleven half-centuries, he scored 1,900 runs in the game’s longest format.
