After the game against Gujarat Titans (GT), Prince Yadav received a call from his coach Amit Vashisht.
“Prince, what is your strength?” Vashisht asked him. “Yorkers, sir,” came the quick reply.
Prince had pitched the second-last ball of his spell short, which Washington Sundar pulled on the leg side for a six. That 14-run over made it an easy passage to victory for GT.
“Where is it then? Where is the yorker?” Vashisht probed. “It is the death overs, beta (son). Yorker is yorker. Back your strength and bowl more of it.”
A week later, Prince nailed his yorkers in the final over against Punjab Kings (PBKS) and gave away just five runs and took a wicket. Never mind that PBKS posted 254 for 7, but Prince came out with few scars and excellent figures of 4-0-25-2. A game later, he wore the Purple Cap for the first time, his two wickets against Rajasthan Royals taking his tally to 13 with an economy rate of 8.38. He has averaged 16.76 runs per wicket in IPL 2026 so far.
Prince is in his second year at the IPL. Lucknow Super Giants (LSG) had picked him at the IPL 2025 auction for his base price of INR 30 lakh. While he impressed with his skills last season, he had only three wickets with an economy rate of 9.85 and an average of 75 to show from six outings. LSG retained him for IPL 2026 and his returns are starting to show. He has stood out in an LSG pace attack that has India internationals in Mohammed Shami, Avesh Khan and Mayank Yadav, as well as Mohsin Khan, who is in his fourth IPL season.
Prince is a product of tennis-ball cricket. But his first stint at top-flight cricket, the IPL, gave him a reality check – that the lengths and skills that worked in tennis-ball cricket may not be enough. And so, Vashisht, who has coached Prince since his initial days at the Sporting Club in Najafgarh in Delhi, got down to adding some variety to his repertoire.
“The main issue was that he was bowling a lot of back-of-length balls, especially in crunch overs,” Vashisht, 45, tells ESPNcricinfo. “So that reduced the chances of picking up wickets. Those lengths were not the uncomfortable lengths – ones that are aimed at the armpits. So, we worked on not just bowling fuller, but also keeping the ball more in the air and generating swing.
“We marked spots on the surface and asked him to land the ball there. We made him bowl spells of three or four overs each. Then we made him do match simulations. For example, if you have to defend 15 runs, then try to bowl to your strengths. His strength is yorkers, so we worked on sharpening those skills. He used the swing nicely to dismiss [Ishan] Kishan and Axar [Patel].”
Getting Prince to bowl increasingly with the new ball was a project that even Delhi head coach Sarandeep Singh, the former India offspinner, undertook. He had closely watched Prince’s progress in the domestic circuit as well as at the Delhi Premier League (DPL). As Prince was raw and quick, a stint in the IPL showed what he had and what he needed to have.
“This season when Prince came to the [Delhi] nets, I told him you should take the new ball,” Sarandeep tells ESPNcricinfo. “Last season, he bowled a lot with the older ball. So whenever he got the new ball, he got hit. He couldn’t comprehend the lengths to bowl with the new ball.
“So I asked him to visualise how he plans to get a batter out by pitching the ball up. He said, ‘I want to get the batter caught at slip’. He has developed a very good outswinger; he worked hard for one-and-a-half months at various camps. I could see the results in the DPL and then for us in the domestic T20s. He was just excellent in the Vijay Hazare Trophy.”
With 18 wickets, Prince was Delhi’s leading wicket-taker in the Vijay Hazare Trophy 2025-26. This was a month after he took eight wickets in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy 2025, the second-most for Delhi.
“He is a quick learner,” Sarandeep says. “I told him that last season no one had seen you; you bowled well in domestic cricket and made it to the IPL. This time, things will be different. Everyone knows what Prince Yadav is going to do. His strength is yorkers. If you want to play well at that level, you should learn to bowl with the new ball and take wickets.”
Prince has picked up five wickets in the powerplay so far in IPL 2026. Only one of those is with a full-length delivery – of Kishan. Two have come via the short ball. Forty-eight percent of his balls in the first six overs have been short or short-of-good length. But there is a change in how many full-length deliveries and yorkers he has bowled: 17% in this IPL, up from just 12% last year.
Adding the slower bouncer to his range has also made it tougher for the batters to line him up.
“There was an increased focus on adding some variations like the slower bouncer,” Vashisht says. “He did not have it in the arsenal last year. It is quite tough to pick his balls because of his fast arm speed. I told him that even I struggle to pick his variations despite standing and watching from behind when he bowls. He has honed these skills by single-wicket bowling for two-three hours at a stretch.”
Sarandeep says giving Prince additional responsibility – of leading the Delhi attack with Ishant Sharma – also fast-tracked his improvement. “I said, ‘this time, we are depending on you. You are a match-winner. You have to take the responsibility of being a frontline bowler with Ishant Sharma’.
“This season he was always around Ishant. He learnt about reading the game from him, about preparing yourself against different oppositions. In the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, you play bigger teams like Karnataka, Mumbai and UP, who play white-ball cricket really well. Their batters are really good. So Ishant being at Delhi really helped Prince.”
It is not easy to stand out in a team that is not winning. With two wins and five defeats, LSG are ninth in the points table at the halfway mark. And Prince is not just their leading wicket-taker but also their second-most economical bowler. His performances may not necessarily result in the team winning, but they certainly are not going unnoticed.
