Cricket greats, writers and broadcasters have praised the 15-year-old Rajasthan Royals opener for scoring a 29-ball 97 in the IPL playoffs.
Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has been described as a ‘generational talent’ after the Rajasthan Royals teenager smashed 97 off 29 balls to lead his team to victory against Sunrisers Hyderabad in the Indian Premier League qualifiers.
The 15-year-old also broke Chris Gayle’s record for most points in an IPL season with six on Wednesday, taking his tally to 65 in a match, surpassing the former West Indies captain’s previous record of 59 in 2012.
Suryavanshi’s performance gave Rajasthan a 47-run victory and kept their hopes of making it to the finals alive.
Rajasthan will play Gujarat Titans in the second qualifier on Friday and the winner will face defending champions Royal Challengers Bangalore in the final on Sunday.
Hyderabad assistant coach James Franklin said the teenage batsman’s chances are scary.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with this much talent. What he’s doing now is strange,” he told reporters. “It’s scary to think that he could have another 25 years of his career left.
“He’s only going to get better and stronger and more mature in his batting. So it’s just devastating at the moment.”
“There’s very little room to bowl to him,” Franklin said. “He’s a great talent and once he starts playing around with that (bowling variation) and then he starts making bowlers have to go elsewhere, that tends to come back to his strengths.”
The season’s top run-scorer hit 12 sixes in the innings, including three in a row off captain Pat Cummins against Hyderabad, but fell short of his record for fastest IPL century off 30 balls.
Sooryavanshi looked visibly disappointed after he missed an uppercut into deep third and was sent off as Sumaran Ravichandran completed a catch.
“I thought about it (100th time) after I got sent off. At that time, I was just focused on contributing as much as I can,” Sooryavanshi said after being named Player of the Match.
“There will be hundreds of people, but the goal is to make sure we win the trophy.”
Sooryavanshi, who hit number six for the first time in his IPL career at the age of 14 last year and went on to become the youngest player to score a T20 hundred, has scored 680 runs this season at a strike rate of 242.85.
Indian cricket great Sachin Tendulkar analyzed Sooryavanshi’s batting on social media and said the baby-faced attacking batsman’s technique allows him to play freely.
“That innings was just spectacular!” Tendulkar wrote.
Former England captain Michael Vaughan hailed the youngster as the best T20 opener and urged India to select him in the national team.
“He is the best T20 opener in the world. India must select him,” Vaughan wrote in X.
Cricket writer and broadcaster Bharat Sundaresan said that despite the size of his bat and record-breaking T20 scores, Sooryavanshi’s achievements were “era-defining”.
“Eight sixes in the first four overs of an innings? What are we looking at? This is unbelievable,” he wrote.
West Indies bowling great Ian Bishop, now a cricket commentator, said the quality of Sooryavanshi’s strokes was “unusual”.
Former India batsman Mohammed Kaif also paid tribute to Sooryavanshi in a tweet, calling him a “wonder boy”.
