Vaibhav Sooryavanshi played all of 14 balls against Mumbai Indians, and didn't even play the best knock of the day. But it was brutal, and took down Jasprit Bumrah on the way. At what point does his age not matter anymore, wonders Rahul Iyer.
Thwack.
Jasprit Bumrah does not get thwack-ed.
Just ask Yashasvi Jaiswal, himself one of India’s most precocious batting talents. Across four innings and 16 balls in the IPL before yesterday, he had cleared the boundary once off India’s greatest fast bowler.
But Vaibhav Sooryavanshi took all of one ball to equal that. And another two to go past it.
Andre Russell, Heinrich Klaasen, MS Dhoni, David Miller and Jaiswal (now) have all managed two sixes off Bumrah’s bowling in the IPL. The fewest deliveries any of them has faced is 22.
Sooryavanshi has played five.
Of course, this was a Bumrah seemingly bowling within himself; he has not bowled a ball over 140 kmph this season, and was at the Centre of Excellence to plan out his workload management before it started. This was also an 11-over game, where a batter’s wicket was devalued even more than usual and risks would be more frequent.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi's 25 minutes of mayhem in Guwahati
As the whip disappeared 88 metres, over the long on fence, Bumrah could do little but shut his eyes in acknowledgement of a poor delivery; it was in the slot, outside leg stump and not overly quick.
The thing is, he can sometimes get away with those. With bowlers of his stature it’s inevitable that on the rare occasions they stray, batters play the name and not the ball. Not to mention Sooryavanshi had never faced him before, and could have been forgiven for having a look first.
He tapped the next ball for a single, but the second Bumrah got a tad bit shorter, that ridiculous bat swing launched him over square leg.
He got away with a high-ish full toss just after, but as if to remind the great man that it was a mere teenager treating him just like anyone else, Sooryavanshi comically stumbled back onto his stumps when trying to regain his ground to avoid a run out.
When Shardul Thakur came on to bowl in this game, he instantly hit him for six over cover, in near-identical fashion to his first-ball six off the same bowler on IPL debut last year. The next ball went for four in the same region, and the reactions on the field told a tale of their own.
There was a hurried conference between Thakur, Bumrah and MI skipper Hardik Pandya as the bowler walked back to his mark. The combined experience of 564 India caps and 410 IPL games were in the frame, sent into a tizzy by this 15-year-old who had faced all of 11 balls until then – one for each IPL title the trio had between them.
Despite the destruction he had already wrought on Bumrah, the crowning moment of the knock in Guwahati was off the fifth ball of Thakur’s first over. Mercifully, the field set popped up on the broadcast as the bowler ran in. Three of the five boundary riders were on the off side; a sweeper, deep backward point and deep cover, the latter shifted there after the first two balls. The other two manned long on and cow corner.
“Agar humein pehla mila, to hum pehle hi udaa denge (If I get the first ball [in my zone], then I will send it flying),” was how Sanju Samson recalled the youngster’s words on the eve of his IPL debut, earlier this year.
You do question what Sooryavanshi thinks his zone is, because here, Thakur bowled to his field.
On a length on off stump, angling across the left-hander. Sooryavanshi has a propensity for slashing hard and getting thick outside edges behind the wicket. The bowler could well have gotten away without conceding a boundary here. Best case, the batter could have holed out.
But he played the field to perfection.
As the bat came from down to up at contact, a vicious twist of the wrists at the last microsecond sent the ball straight back over the vacant long off region. It flew over the rope for six, but even a mis-timed shot might have landed safely.
He was out the very next ball, but not before the ball sprang off his bat with the force of a ballistic missile and nearly swept the boundary catcher Tilak Varma off his feet. Half a foot higher and it would have cleared him for six more.
When does Sooryavanshi's age cease to matter?
Fourteen balls of Rajasthan’s 66 on the day were all he faced – Jaiswal played the better knock, batting through the innings for an unbeaten 77, scoring at 14.4 runs an over – but in those fourteen, Sooryavanshi cleared the boundary five times. His teammates managed six in 52 balls between them. Off Bumrah, he hit two in five, his teammates one in 13.
His instantaneous attack on the world’s most feared bowler had shades of another teenager, 16-year-old Sachin Tendulkar’s four sixes and 28 runs in an over off the great Abdul Qadir in 1989. There is an impudence about both occurrences that immediately commands attention.
Merely calling Sooryavanshi impudent, insolent or impertinent – take your pick – does little justice to what we are seeing. It implies a degree of childishness or even innocence, of not knowing the cauldron into which you step, of remaining blissful in your naïveté. He knows full well where he stands (and where he wants to send the ball).
There needs to come a point where the lens of his age doesn’t apply anymore. He is not an extraordinary cricketer for a 15-year-old. He is simply an extraordinary cricketer.
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