MUMBAI (Reuters) - Yuvraj Singh, India's middle-over batting lynchpin in two World Cup triumphs, is to retire from international cricket with immediate effect, the 37-year-old said on Monday.
The all-rounder, accompanied by his wife and mother, told reporters of his decision at a city hotel close to the Wankhede Stadium where India lifted their last 50-overs World Cup title in 2011.
"I have decided to move on. Cricket has given me everything and that's why I am standing here," he said after being reduced to tears by a video of the highlights of his career.
"It’s been a love-hate relationship."
Yuvraj, who played the last of his 304 one-day internationals two years ago, was a key cog in India's World Twenty20 triumph in 2007 and was player-of-the-tournament at the World Cup four years later.
In his heyday, Yuvraj was one of the cleanest strikers of the ball in the game -- as England’s Stuart Broad discovered when he was bludgeoned for six sixes in one over during the 2007 World Twenty20.
He was part of the victorious 2019 Mumbai Indians squad in the Indian Premier League, the most glamorous and cash-rich T20 league in the world, but played in only four matches during the campaign.
Yuvraj made an emotional return to the game in 2012 after a lengthy fight with a rare germ cell cancer in his lungs and played the last of his 40 tests that same year.
He scored 1,900 runs in the longest format of the game with three hundreds and 11 half-centuries.
(Reporting by Sudipto Ganguly, editing by Nick Mulvenney)