Prince Yadav: After Virender Sehwag, Najafgarh sends another cricketer to Team India

The world came to know about Najafgarh, a little-known village on the outskirts of Delhi, through Virender Sehwag’s great batting exploits. And now, after 25 years, another Najafgarh-based cricketer is set to represent India. Hard-working 24-year-old pace bowler Prince Yadav has been picked for India’s three-match one-day international home series against Afghanistan, starting June 13, as well as the T20 international series in Ireland and England starting this month.

Prince, who comes from Dariyapur Khurd village, excelled in tennis-ball cricket before switching to leather-ball cricket. And now, he makes the leather ball talk just enough to flummox batsmen, much like he used to bowl toe-crushing yorkers with the tennis ball. The ball that beat Virat Kohli’s bat and castled him in an IPL 2026 match made headlines.

Son of a retired Railways policeman, Prince has graduated through the Delhi Premier League (DPL) T20 and the IPL — and that too quite rapidly. The DPL was launched in 2023, and the next year he bagged the first hat-trick of the league, which was part of his 13-wicket haul for the Rishabh Pant-led Purani Dilli-6. “It was the turning point of his career,” Amit Vashisht, the coach who made Prince switch from tennis-ball to leather-ball cricket eight years ago, told Patriot.

Prince’s performance in the DPL made everyone sit up and take notice of his talent and hard work. Lucknow Super Giants (LSG), too, spotted the spark in Prince and bought him at his base price of Rs 30 lakh at the 2024 IPL auction.

For LSG, Yadav’s outing in 2025 was ordinary as he bagged three wickets in six innings at a high economy rate of 9.85 in the IPL. He, however, improved in 2026, capturing 16 wickets in 14 matches at an economy rate of 8.83. His strike rate also improved a great deal: while he dismissed batsmen every 45.67 balls in 2025, in 2026 he significantly improved it to 19.50.

“Prince wouldn’t play too many matches earlier. He would play only club games and would stay away from social media. He was very disciplined in his life; he still is. He has been with me for eight years,” Vashisht, who is attached to the Sporting Cricket Club, told Patriot. “He is a bowler with a large heart.”

Also Read: Fifty Tests for Rishabh Pant: against the odds and back

Prince, at 18, tried fudging his age, and the BCCI imposed a two-year ban on him in 2019 after he tried to represent the Delhi under-19 team. However, the ban didn’t weigh too heavily on him, as the Covid pandemic consumed a lot of that period while cricket virtually came to a standstill in the country.

Today, Prince’s father, who initially did not support his son’s cricketing ambitions, is happy that he had a change of heart in 2024. How? “It was the hat-trick he took in the DPL T20 that gave me confidence that he could make a career in cricket, while my neighbours advised me not to discourage him from playing the game. But I never thought that he would be picked for the Indian team; I thought that the IPL was good enough,” Ram Niwas Yadav, who retired as a head constable from the Railway Protection Force, told Patriot.