It is normal for a teenager to play the bowler and not the ball but Vaibhav Sooryanshi doesn’t care about who he is facing, his Rajasthan Royals teammate Dhruv Jurel pointed out. The 15-year-old has cared little for reputation all through this IPL whether it is having a go at Jasprit Bumrah or more recently at Pat Cummins. The list of champion bowlers who have been at the receiving end of Sooryavanshi’s onslaught include Mohammed Siraj, Josh Hazlewood and Kagiso Rabada. On Wednesday, he made Cummins, a multiple time World Cup winner and among the shrewdest operators in the game, look clueless with his barrage of sixes.
Cummins tried to curtail his free flowing bat swing by bowling full into the leg-stump but Sooryavanshi made instant adjustments to dispatch the ball over the Australian’s head. The subsequent short ball was slashed over third man while the next delivery, a slower ball, was smoked down the ground. Cummins had run out of ideas in the third over.
Sooryavanshi ended up with a matching winning 97 off 29 balls, just one hit away from breaking Chris Gayle’s record for the fastest IPL hundred. Jurel, who has seen Sooryavanshi from close quarters, made his observations about the wonder kid.
“The best thing about Vaibhav that I have noticed is that he doesn’t plan anything because he practices a lot and he always backs himself. That’s what he does every time he goes out and plays. The best thing about him is that he backs himself. He doesn’t even have a shadow of doubt that ‘I am not able to do it’.” Jurel, himself in top form with six fifties in the competition, mentioned another aspect of his younger colleague’s batting that makes him one of a kind.
“When we go to an academy, (we’re told) ‘Don’t watch the bowler, watch the ball. As 17-year-olds, we always watch the bowler, (and think) he’s a big name. But really, he just watches the ball. That’s all. His mantra is ‘I don’t give a damn about any bowler’.”
What Sooryavanshi is doing is freakish
Even Sunrisers Hyderabad were too quick to applaud his special knock in the Eliminator.
Assistant coach James Franklin spoke on how their plans for Sooryavanshi came to nothing.
“There was a very, very small margin where you could bowl to him. I guess when you’re playing on a really good pitch as well, it makes it particularly hard for bowlers to try and execute that tiny margin that you’re looking for,” Franklin said.
“I think you probably saw in the first couple of overs of the Powerplay that we were trying to bowl quite full, sort of inside stump leg, trying to get under his swing. But he started to work that out.” Sooryavanshi hammered 12 sixes in an innings to remember, surpassing Gayle for most sixes in a season.
Franklin, a former fast bowler from New Zealand, said the world has not seen a talent like Sooryavanshi.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a talent like this. It’s freakish what he’s doing at the moment. To think that he’s potentially got 25 years left in the career is quite scary. He’s only going to get better, he’s only going to get stronger, he’s only going to get more mature with how he bats,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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