Vaibhav Sooryavanshi doesn’t care who he is against, as his Rajasthan Royals teammate Dhruv Jurel said. It is typical for a teenager to play the bowler rather than the ball.
Throughout the IPL, the 15-year-old has shown little concern for reputation, whether he is playing against Jasprit Bumrah or, more lately, Pat Cummins. Mohammed Siraj, Josh Hazlewood, and Kagiso Rabada are among the champion bowlers who have fallen victim to Sooryavanshi’s assault.
With his onslaught of sixes on Wednesday, he made Cummins, a multiple World Cup winner and one of the game’s most cunning operators, appear clueless.
Cummins bowled hard into the leg-stump in an attempt to limit his free-flowing bat swing, but Sooryavanshi quickly adjusted to send the ball over the Australian’s head. The next delivery was a slower ball that was smoked down the ground, while the next short ball was cut over third man. In the third over, Cummins had run out of ideas.
With a match-winning 97 off 29 balls, Sooryavanshi was only one knock away from surpassing Chris Gayle’s record for the fastest IPL hundred.
Jurel made his observations about the wonder kid after seeing Sooryavanshi up close.
“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'”, PTI quoted Jurel as saying.
Another characteristic of his younger teammate’s batting that sets him apart was noticed by Jurel, who is himself in excellent form with six fifties in the competition.
“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’.”
