There have been great batters in cricket history, but none of them have done at 14 what Suryavanshi did on Monday night against a bowling attack boasting 694 international caps
Karthik Krishnaswamy29-Apr-20255:27
‘Otherworldly’ Suryavanshi wows Bishop and Aaron
Speed is distance divided by time, and in that equation rests a partial answer to a question you may have asked yourself again and again on Monday night, when you watched Rajasthan Royals (RR) take on Gujarat Titans (GT) in Jaipur.How can a 14-year-old hit the ball that far?Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s bat traces remarkable distances in remarkably brief timespans. When he winds up, he lifts his bat so high that his gloves are at shoulder level behind him. By the time his bat completes its swing, it’s usually traced a full circle and come to rest above his other shoulder.Young batters are advised not to let their hands stray too far from their body in their backlift, lest they lose control of their bat-swing. Through cricket’s long and glorious history, however, several batters have disobeyed that maxim and thrilled the world. Suryavanshi belongs to a great lineage. Garfield Sobers. Brian Lara. Vinod Kambli. Yuvraj Singh. Victor Trumper in that immortal photograph. Harmanpreet Kaur in this one.Related
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For all the remarkable things those other names have done on cricket fields, though, none of them did at 14 what Suryavanshi did on Monday night to a bowling attack boasting 694 international caps. At an age when most of us were still working out the finer details of the classic schoolchild dream – venue, opposition, shots played to reach various milestones, partner at the other end at those moments – Suryavanshi lived it.Ishant Sharma was once a teenage prodigy. He was 19 when he bowled his famous spell to Ricky Ponting at the WACA in 2008. That spell preceded Suryavanshi’s birth by three years and two months.The two came face to face on Monday, and their skirmish was just one ball old when it exploded to life.Suryavanshi had already hit a six by then – off Mohammed Siraj, the man who displaced Ishant from India’s Test-match pace attack four years ago – and that shot had come off a ball pitched on the fuller side of a good length. That six had been the classic six of the high-backlift, circular-swing type of batter, launched with a stable base over long-on, and that shot had perhaps led Ishant to think of testing Suryavanshi with the short ball.
WATCH – Highlights of Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s record-breaking hundred on JioHotstar (India only)
It was a good short ball too, slanted across the left-hand batter, finishing near his rear shoulder: a tricky angle to hook against, an awkward height to hook from. Suryavanshi picked a vacant space to the right of deep backward square leg, swiveled on his back leg, and hooked it for six.So quickly was Suryavanshi in position for this hook, back foot deep in his crease before the ball left Ishant’s hand, that it suggested he had been expecting the short ball. Perhaps this informed the length of Ishant’s next ball. Or perhaps it was just a bad ball, a half-volley bowled by a rattled 36-year-old to a batter less than half his age.Either way, Suryavanshi whipped it for another six, a 91m hit that landed on the pink canvas roof of the first tier of stands beyond the midwicket boundary.4:33
Bishop on Suryavanshi’s record: ‘That was mind-blowing’
This was the ninth ball Suryavanshi had faced. He had already played an extraordinary innings. He had shown incredible bat-speed, and he had shown the eye and control over that unusually expansive bat-swing to strike balls of different lengths, from fast bowlers of international quality, with pinpoint timing while holding his shape through shots off front and back foot. He had shown all this at the age of 14 years and 32 days.And Suryavanshi wasn’t even close to being done. There was so much more of his range still left to show off.This has been a terrible IPL season for the offspinner-to-LHB match-up. Before Monday’s game, it had produced a 140-plus batting strike rate for the first time in any IPL season. Even so, given everything Suryavanshi had done up to then, it was natural for GT to bring on Washington Sundar in the fifth over and try and see how Suryavanshi would handle him.He handled himself to the tune of 6, 0, 6, 4, and if the first six was a regulation pull, the second was a sensational example of length manipulation. This was the kind of ball with which Washington has tied down a series of left-hand batters: flat, quick, into the surface, not full enough to loft down the ground, not short enough for a genuine horizontal-bat shot, and angled into leg stump to minimise width. It’s not a ball you can hit for six over backward square leg; not unless you do what Suryavanshi did, dropping on to his back knee in a flash and swiveling through the hips like a breakdancer.We have watched Rishabh Pant play this shot numerous times, but our jaws continue to drop whenever he does it. It’s that difficult, and who else even plays it? Well, now there’s someone else, and he’s 14.5:13
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The sixes took Suryavanshi to 47. The four – one-bounce, lofted neatly over the covers – brought up the half-century off 17 balls. The quickest of this season.And he wasn’t done even now. Having scored 52 off 20 in the powerplay, he still needed to show he could do 49 off 18 outside it. For all the gobsmacking shots he had already played, he still had to play the shot of his innings, a drive over long-off after going deep in his crease to manufacture elevation against Prasidh Krishna. For all the damage he had already done to GT’s individual bowling figures, he hadn’t yet gone 6, 4, 6, 4, 4, 6 and taken Karim Janat for 30 runs in an over.He had scored the fastest half-century of the season; he hadn’t yet scored the second-fastest hundred in the 18-year history of the tournament. It fell to Rashid Khan to bowl the ball that took Suryavanshi there, a long-hop that he dumped over the leg-side boundary with another violent hip-swivel.It was the 11th six of Suryavanshi’s innings. It was by no means the biggest one, and Siraj, flinging himself backwards at deep midwicket, made a doomed effort to catch it at the boundary, landing flat on his back and remaining there for a few more seconds, taking whatever rest this evening had to offer him, in whatever form it came.And that, perhaps, was all of us too – dazed, flat on our metaphorical backs, taking in the enormity of the moment as Suryavanshi, pulling his helmet off to reveal the full extent of his cherubic boyishness, soaked it in.1:47
When a young Tendulkar shocked Ian Bishop in his pomp
There was something poetic about Suryavanshi getting to his century off Rashid’s bowling. Rashid had been a teenage prodigy himself, an unimaginably precocious shatterer of records, but even he was 17 when he burst on to the big stage. When you are in school, the gap between 14 and 17 can seem impossibly vast.And Rashid is the great legspinner of his day. On December 16, 1989, that title had belonged to Abdul Qadir. On that day, Sachin Tendulkar had taken Qadir to the cleaners, hitting him for 27 runs in an over while scoring 53 off 18 balls in a proto-T20 game – an unofficial 20-overs-a-side match arranged after an ODI in Peshawar had been abandoned due to bad light.Tendulkar was 16 then, and Suryavanshi is younger still, an age both precocious and, to the viewer, precarious. You are old enough if you are good enough, yes, but it’s still legitimate to ask if a 14-year-old should even be playing professional sport, with all its pressures and pitfalls.But then you watch Suryavanshi’s bat trace that smooth, powerful circle and launch the ball into the night sky, and you still your doubts and fears. This boy was born to bat.