Biography & Career Overview
Mayank Prabhu Yadav is the rarest commodity in Indian cricket made flesh: a genuine express quick bowler the domestic system produced on its own, not one imported or imagined. Born on 17 June 2002 in New Delhi and raised in Punjabi Bagh in West Delhi, he bowls right-arm fast at velocities that until recently belonged to foreign-era pace batteries, and by the age of twenty-two he had already arrived in the Indian T20 International team with a record that bends how fast an Indian bowler has ever run in the Indian Premier League. In his first IPL season with real playing time, 2024, he bowled the two fastest deliveries of the tournament (155.8 km/h and then, in his very next match, 156.7 km/h) a number that sits among the fastest balls ever recorded in IPL history. He represents Delhi in domestic cricket and the Lucknow Super Giants in the IPL, and his arc from a West Delhi household that paid for coaching long before any return, through two seasons lost to back injury, to the national team in roughly three seasons is one of the steepest rises an Indian quick bowler has taken in the modern era.
Early Life in West Delhi: Punjabi Bagh, Rohtak Road and the Sonnet Club
Mayank grew up in Punjabi Bagh, a dense trading neighbourhood in West Delhi, in a middle-class family whose name appears in his own: the registered name ESPNcricinfo and Wikipedia carry is Mayank Prabhu Yadav, with his father's first name in the middle slot. His father is Prabhu Yadav and his mother is Mamta Yadav, both named in Aaj Tak's family interview at the peak of the 2024 IPL breakthrough, and both quoted by their son ever since as the reason he kept bowling.
The cricketing record of those early years is more precise than the generic "local academies" phrasing such profiles usually settle for. The Delhi Junction reported on 2 April 2024 that Prabhu Yadav first sent his son to the Rohtak Road Gymkhana, the ground that anchors central Delhi's gully-and-turf circuit, and that it was Mayank himself, at fourteen or fifteen, who asked to be moved on: "Then when he was 14-15, he asked me to put him in the Sonnet Club," his father told the outlet. The Times of India profiled him on 31 March 2024 as a "god-fearing West Delhi boy from the Sonnet Club stable," a framing that stuck because it was accurate, and reported the family's life in Punjabi Bagh changed overnight by twenty-four deliveries. Sonnet Club, in West Delhi, was where the raw material (height, a long straight run-up, a naturally high release) was shaped into repeatable mechanics, and the club's coach Tarak Sinha is the name attached in reporting to the earliest correction in him: that he had no run-up at all when he arrived. Sinha died in July 2024, the year after his academy's most startling export had debuted in the IPL.
The schooling record is thin and is stated as such. ET Now Luxe described him in a profile of 22 July 2026 as a class-twelve graduate whose cricket training took over from there, and no outlet consulted for this profile names a school or a college degree; none is invented here. What the same reporting documents is the devotional side of the household: Aaj Tak's interview headlined the family's devotion to Krishna, and Yahoo's report of 24 July 2026 had Prabhu Yadav performing the Govardhan Parikrama in Mathura, more than 7,000 kilometres away, at the moment his son was bowling in Harare.
Domestic Career: Three Formats in Twenty-Two Months
Mayank's List A debut came for Delhi against Haryana in the 2021–22 Vijay Hazare Trophy on 12 December 2021, a match in which he took three wickets, announcing the pattern that would follow: wicket-taking on contact with the ball at senior level. What happened next was unusual enough to become part of his legend. Although he had played only two List A matches in his life, the Lucknow Super Giants picked him up at the 2022 IPL mega auction for ₹20 lakh, a bet on pure speed made before the domestic record could justify it. The bet did not pay immediately (he did not play a single match for LSG that season) but it placed his name in the auction-consciousness of Indian cricket two years before his time came.
He made his T20 debut for Delhi against Manipur in the 2022–23 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy on 11 October 2022, taking two wickets at an economy rate of 5.75, and his first-class debut against Maharashtra in the 2022–23 Ranji Trophy on 13 December 2022. Three formats, three debuts, in less than twenty-four months from his first List A ball, the conventional domestic apprenticeship compressed into a fast-forward tape. The Ranji debut mattered particularly: express pace in India is usually stress-tested on flattening subcontinent decks where the wicket is offered to spinners, and a quick bowler who survives four-day cricket in those conditions earns a different kind of selection argument.
IPL 2024: The Fastest Two Matches in Lucknow History
Injury cost him the 2023 IPL season entirely, and for a bowler bought on promise the second unused season threatened to redefine him as a project, not a player. The 2024 season answered the question in one week. Mayank made his IPL debut against Punjab Kings and finished with three wickets for 27 runs, bowling the fastest ball of the entire 2024 tournament up to that point (155.8 km/h) a performance that earned him the Player of the Match award. In his very next match, against Royal Challengers Bengaluru, he took three wickets while conceding only 14 runs and broke his own record from the previous week with a delivery timed at 156.7 km/h. Two matches, two fastest-ball records, and an economy rate that belonged in a spin-bowling figure: the combination is what turned a good domestic season into a national-team conversation. The speeds placed him at the top of the IPL's recorded-pace hierarchy and made him, at twenty-one, one of the fastest bowlers ever to operate in the league's history. He finished that tournament with seven wickets in four matches, the tally the Super Giants' own profile carries.
International Career: T20I Debut, Injury, and a Harare Return
The IPL season's argument was accepted in October 2024. Mayank was selected for India's three-match home T20I series against Bangladesh and made his international debut on 6 October 2024. The debut produced a detail that enters the record books cleanly: following Ajit Agarkar and Arshdeep Singh, he became only the third Indian bowler to bowl his first over in T20 Internationals as a maiden, six legal deliveries, no runs scored off them. A fast bowler's first international over is a psychological event before it is a cricketing one; to deliver it dot-ball against international batters announced the composure that matches the velocity.
Injury again intervened, in installments this time, not all at once. He returned to bowling in April 2025 and made his IPL comeback for the Lucknow Super Giants on 27 April 2025, but a fresh back complaint eleven days later ended his tournament after two matches, and the franchise signed Will O'Rourke as his replacement. That made 2025 the second season the body had taken out of a young express bowler's ledger, the same accounting that has shortened the careers of quicks from Jeff Thomson to Lasith Malinga. He returned on both fronts in 2026: back in the Lucknow squad for a reported ₹11 crore retention ahead of the season, where he played four matches and went wicketless, and then in India's three-match away T20I series against Zimbabwe, a recall against that form which Sportskeeda's cricket desk noted at the time. The Harare series repaid the selection: on 23 July 2026 he marked his return to the national side after an absence of 649 days by taking a wicket off the very first ball he bowled and finishing with two for 18, and the third match on 25 July produced figures of three for 29, the best of his international career. His record now stands at nine wickets in six T20Is at an average of 17.22. The squad recall proved the first selection had not been a one-season weather event, and it gave a bowler whose two previous seasons had been decided by scans the rarest thing in express pace: a third.
Playing Style: The Physics and the Price
Standing around six feet with a long, rhythmic run-up, Mayank releases the ball from a genuine high arm over a braced front leg, which is why his pace carries more than the speed gun suggests: the ball arrives at the bat steeper than the trajectory implies, and the bounce off good-length deliveries sits up toward the batter's eyes and the helmet. His stock weapon is the hard-length ball at 150-plus km/h, and his recorded 156.7 km/h is best understood not as a party trick but as evidence of a ceiling most Indian bowling machines cannot replicate. The price of the currency is durability (the 2023 and 2025 seasons lost to injury are the visible installments of the same bill every express bowler pays) and the second variable is control, since pace at the limit narrows the window in which the ball is both fast and legal or directed. His first IPL weeks handled both: three wickets in each of his first two matches with economies that looked misprinted beside the speed figures.
Personal Life: Family, Faith, and What Is Not on Record
An earlier version of this profile described Mayank's personal record as deliberately thin and limited it to his father's first name. The published reporting is fuller than that, and the section is rewritten on it. His parents are Prabhu Yadav and Mamta Yadav, both named in Aaj Tak's exclusive family interview of 4 April 2024, when their son was the IPL's newest discovery; Prabhu Yadav is the father quoted by The Delhi Junction describing the two academies he paid for, and the man whose Mathura pilgrimage ran concurrently with his son's Harare comeback (Yahoo, 24 July 2026). The family home is in Punjabi Bagh, West Delhi, which the Times of India's 2024 profile took as the frame of the story.
What is not on the record is stated plainly. No outlet consulted for this profile reports a marriage, a partner or children, and none is asserted here. His father's occupation is given only in user-uploaded social-media bios, which describe him as a factory worker; because no news outlet consulted here publishes it, it is excluded here, not repeated. The same applies to a name circulating on video aggregators for a sister: no consulted outlet documents a sibling, so none is claimed. His public social presence runs through his own Instagram account and his cricket, and his profile in this archive is written on the same basis as everything above: cricketing record and named reporting, with the gaps left as gaps.
His Place in the Yadav Story
Mayank Yadav extends the Yadav cricket record from the batting of Suryakumar Yadav and the spin of Kuldeep Yadav into express pace, the discipline Indian cricket has historically found hardest to produce, and the one in which a Yadav name now appears at the top of the speed charts. The two share more than the surname franchise: both came through the Indian domestic-to-IPL-to-international pipeline in the 2020s, and both are white-ball specialists whose national-team cases were built inside the IPL season, not outside it. He now shares a Lucknow dressing room with Prince Yadav, the other Yadav quick in the Super Giants camp, whose route to the same squad ran through the Delhi Premier League instead of an academy. The cricketers hub gathers the family of Yadav profiles, and the long-read origins of the Yadav community provides the documented social backdrop against which surnames like his travel through Indian sport. Where an outside source disagrees with our record, the corrections policy explains how we resolve it.
How This Profile Was Verified
Birth details, debut dates, match figures, and speed records were taken from Mayank Yadav's published cricket records as maintained on Wikipedia and ESPNcricinfo and cross-checked against IPL season reporting from the 2024 tournament; the T20I debut date, the maiden first-over fact, and the Zimbabwe comeback series were verified against the same record set as reported by named sports outlets. An earlier version of this profile said he was ruled out of the whole of IPL 2025; on 4 October 2026 that was corrected against ESPNcricinfo's injury report and Yahoo Sports' comeback match record, which establish two matches played after his 27 April 2025 return before a back injury ended his tournament. His international figures are stated as ESPNcricinfo's career table gives them (six matches, nine wickets, 17.22, best 3/29), with the economy and strike rate derived from the published balls and runs, not quoted as primary. ESPNcricinfo returns an error to automated requests, so its reporting is used here as it appears in search summaries and has not been re-read in full.
The review of 5 October 2026 replaced the personal-life section instead of extending it. The earlier text rested the family record on one Economic Times profile and on his father's first name; the fuller record is Aaj Tak's exclusive family interview of 4 April 2024, which names both parents, Prabhu Yadav and Mamta Yadav, and The Delhi Junction's backstory of 2 April 2024, which supplies the two-academy sequence from Rohtak Road Gymkhana to Sonnet Club and quotes his father on it. The "god-fearing West Delhi boy from the Sonnet Club stable" line, carried here previously on the Economic Times wire, also appears in the Times of India's reporting of 31 March 2024, and both links are now in the sources panel. The Harare spell is recorded match by match against ESPNcricinfo's listed results (two for 18 on 23 July and three for 29 on 25 July), and the 649-day gap between caps is kept as the number his own comeback reporting used.
Three claims were examined and left out. The father's occupation as a factory worker appears only in user-uploaded bios and social posts, so it is excluded; so is a sister's name circulating on video aggregators, because no consulted outlet documents a sibling; and so is every net-worth figure published by salary-tracker websites, which is why the money field carries only the auction price, the reported retention and no estimate. Marriage and children remain unrecorded by the outlets consulted and are stated as such. Where an outside source disagrees with our record, our corrections policy explains how we resolve it.
