Yash Dayal has picked seven wickets in four games ©IPL
When Yash Dayal made his IPL debut, Sunil Gavaskar jokingly mentioned on air that he had a word with Ashish Nehra, the Gujarat Titans head coach, enquiring if the young left-arm pacer had spoken to him. Nehra apparently responded that even if Yash wouldn't have made the effort, he wasn't going to stop speaking to him. The exchange was indicative of Nehra's chirpy nature, but inadvertently also revealed a little truth about Dayal's persona.
The 24-year-old left-arm pacer is measured with words and reserved with his expressions. "It's not about me being unexcited, that's just how I am," he says to Cricbuzz when recollecting the moment he was picked in the IPL auction earlier in the year.
But even he had a small moment of divergence last year when thinking about his idol. Away from the IPL, Dayal had his own moment of FOMO sitting at home. IPL 2021 was into its third day and several cricketers - from India and overseas - had their opportunities to showcase their skills in the world's biggest cricket league. Dayal, away from all the action, posted a video clip on his Facebook account with the caption 'How I bowled vs how I felt I bowled'.
It was a clip of him knocking out the off pole of a Delhi opener followed by a clip of Zaheer Khan uprooting Hashim Amla's off stump in South Africa. "My only role model was Zaheer Khan," the shy pacer from Uttar Pradesh tells Cricbuzz. "I have never had a chance to meet him but everyone says that my bowling action resembles his. It's because he is the only bowler I have followed ever since I was a kid."
Brought up in Allahabad, Dayal trained under Ghulam Murtuza, father of cricketer
