Akash Sudan

Akash Sudan doesn’t describe his childhood relationship with cricket in terms of statistics or performance or achievements. He doesn’t talk about technique or ambition. When he reaches for an explanation, he lands somewhere deeply personal.

Cricket was comfort.

He was five years old. He didn’t know how to grip a bat. None of that mattered. What he remembers most isn’t a match or a milestone. It’s the scooter rides to the ground with his father, cutting through Delhi traffic, the city blurring past him. His father had played university and club cricket, never at the top level, but he was the kind of person who loved the game with his whole heart.

His family came from a lower middle-class background where stability and education mattered deeply. His mother hoped he would focus on academics, but his father saw things differently and his message was always simple: play the game if it makes you happy.

That freedom mattered.

For Akash, cricket had simply been joy, something he did because it felt right. But by the time he was nine, something shifted. A century in a school match, ten or eleven sixes from a kid that age, and teachers stopped what they were doing, classmates gathered, the whole school watched. He was awarded in front of everyone. For the first time, cricket gave him something beyond joy. It gave him recognition, and with that recognition came the sense that this could be more than just a game he loved.

But the path that usually follows such early promise, the structured age-group pyramid of Under-16, Under-19, Under-23, never quite opened up for him. While his peers moved through those tiers, Akash remained on the outside looking in. The trials came and went. Nothing materialised.

His father wasn’t even in Delhi. But he didn’t panic. He didn’t lecture. He told his son to relax, told him he didn’t need to worry about work, about money, about anything. Just play. That he was there. That he would always be there. It was the kind of support that didn’t come with conditions, and in that moment, it was the only thing keeping Akash from walking away.

Akash stayed.

Not long after that phone call, Akash turned up for a club game at St. Stephen’s ground, Delhi against a team from Rajasthan. The afternoon was hot, the ground familiar, the stakes no different from any other league match. But something about the way Akash bowled that day was different. Ball after ball found its length, found its line, found something that had been missing for months. He took six wickets. In the stands that day was Vijay Dahiya, the former India cricketer.

Akash Sudan was selected for the Delhi senior squad. No age-group cricket. No conventional route. Just a six-wicket spell and someone senior enough to trust what he saw.

When the news arrived, he shouted in excitement, ran through the house, and hugged his parents. His mother began crying immediately while his father initially panicked, not understanding what had happened. Only after a moment did they realise. Their son had been selected for Delhi.

The Delhi dressing room was not a gentle introduction. Virender Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, Shikhar Dhawan, Ishant Sharma, Nitish Rana. For a kid from a modest background with no age-group pedigree, it was overwhelming.

But cricket often has a way of testing newcomers quickly.

His T20 debut came against Goa. Delhi had collapsed to 89 all out. Goa needed 14 runs from the last three overs with wickets in hand. Until that point, Akash had not bowled. Then Gautam Gambhir handed him the ball. Akash delivered a maiden over and took two wickets. Delhi went on to win the match by two runs. Years later, he still calls it the most memorable game of his career.

The next match was the lesson. Against Baroda, Akash had bowled fourteen consecutive dot balls, composed, controlled, impressive. Then Hardik Pandya came in. The final over went badly. A few sixes, and suddenly it was everywhere: social media posts, viral clips, articles picking apart every ball. The scrutiny was disproportionate and relentless.

For a young cricketer still establishing himself, the criticism was brutal. It took him six to eight months to recover mentally. His father pulled him through that period the same way he always had: without drama, without pressure, just by being present

Soon after, he was diagnosed with a serious spinal infection. He couldn’t run properly, couldn’t bowl a single over. Doctors advised him not to play. But Akash ran from the hospital to play the Syed Mushtaq Ali League.

He played. Then made his Ranji Trophy debut with a Grade 3 hip flexor tear. Then played the Ranji final with a fractured ankle. He bowled 27 overs in a day and a half on a broken foot. A tennis elbow so severe he couldn’t lift a rubber ball. Seven or eight ankle fractures across his career. Every time the body broke, the decision in his head was the same. He knew the injury could get worse, knew the pain would be constant, knew that playing through it might cost him months of recovery later. None of that mattered more than being on the field. The consistency in how he responded to each one was always the same: he played.

During COVID, both his parents fell critically ill at the same time. His grandmother passed away. Cricket disappeared from his life for months, not because of a decision, but because life demanded it. His father, the man who had held everything together through every setback and every phone call, was now the one who needed support. Akash stayed home. He cooked, he managed, he watched his family heal slowly. Cricket waited.

When he came back, he moved to Chandigarh and eventually got a call to play for them in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, in Mumbai, at the Bandra Kurla Complex ground. The same ground where his professional journey had begun years earlier with Delhi.

Walking onto that field, he broke down. Eight years of everything, the debut, the public humiliation, the injuries, the grief, the comebacks, and life had brought him back to where it started. That day stirred something he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a long time: the full weight of what the sport had given him, and what it had taken.

In the 2024-25 season, Akash put in the most work of his career. Practice match against Goa: five wickets. He was in the squad. He was ready. Then, without explanation, he was dropped from the practice match altogether.

He switched off his phone. Got in his car and drove. For four or five days, he didn’t know where he was going, just moving through the city at night, sitting somewhere, not understanding what was happening. He wasn’t eating properly. He wasn’t sleeping. The confusion wasn’t just about cricket; it was about whether any of it, the years, the injuries, the sacrifice, had ever mattered at all. Everyone who knew him well knew one thing about Akash Sudan: he never quits. This was different.

Sandeep Sharma, the IPL bowler and a teammate in the Chandigarh squad, somehow heard about what happened. He had missed Akash’s calls earlier but rang back. They talked for thirty or forty minutes. Sandeep didn’t offer solutions. He just listened, and then asked a simple question: what else do you love?

That conversation opened up something Akash hadn’t given himself permission to consider. That cricket could still be part of his life without being all of it. That walking away from playing didn’t mean walking away from the game.

In January 2025, Akash Sudan stepped away from professional cricket. Shortly after, Delhi Cricket appointed him as a High Performance Coach across all age categories. His colleagues in that room include men who played for India, who were on the 1983 World Cup squad. He is the youngest person there and the one who has played the least, but what he brings is something different: eight years of learning what it takes to keep going when nothing goes your way.

Today, coaching gives him something playing never quite could: the ability to be present with someone else’s journey. He thinks often about Vijay Dahiya, the coach he watches most carefully in his new environment, and the way he handles each young cricketer as an individual. That quality of attention is what Akash wants to learn. That is what he wants to build.

Akash Sudan’s story doesn’t have a clean ending. No trophy, no India cap, no final over where everything comes together. What it has is something harder to replicate: the image of a man who gave the game everything he had, absorbed every rejection without bitterness, and found a way to stay connected to the sport not through glory but through purpose.

Failures will always outnumber successes in sport. What matters is learning how to endure them without losing belief.

And maybe that’s not the whole truth. Maybe there were moments where giving up felt closer than he’d ever admit. But the fact that he’s still here, still in the game, still showing up at the ground every morning, says something that no trophy ever could.