The baby boss | Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

A week after his blistering 175 off 80 balls against England powered India to the Under-19 World Cup title in February, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi quietly sat out his CBSE Class 10 board exams in Samastipur, Bihar. With cricket consuming nearly all of his time and energy, Vaibhav had scarcely been able to devote time to academics. In much of small-town Bihar, where the old doctrine that one should at least clear matriculation—10th pass karna hi chahiye—still holds, the decision raised more than a few eyebrows.It does not bother father Sanjeev Sooryavanshi, who runs a jewellery business. You just have to call him to find out why. Sanjeev’s ringback tune is a line from a Manna Dey song in the 1969 film Ek Phool, Do Mali—‘Mera naam karega roshan jag mein mera raj dulara’, about a son making his father proud. In the Sooryavanshi household, though, it sounds less like nostalgia and more like conviction. Indeed, Vaibhav has exploded with such precocious authority in the Indian Premier League (IPL) that the game is still adjusting, almost in real time, to the arrival of the phenomenon. It’s hard to believe that the southpaw is still only 15. The 2026 IPL was only his second season, but the figures are absurd enough already—the unbeaten 103 against Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH), the back-to-back 90s (97 in just 29 balls again against SRH again, and 97 in 47 balls against Gujarat Titans in the play-offs). In 16 matches for Rajasthan Royals (RR) this season, he amassed 776 runs at an average of 48.50 and a mind-boggling strike rate of 237.30, finishing with the Orange Cap as the tournament’s top run-scorer. He struck 72 sixes—the most by any batter in a single IPL season—surpassing a record that had long seemed inseparable from the West Indian six-machine Chris Gayle’s mythology.In 2025, RR had bought him for Rs 1.1 crore, and almost immediately the tournament was forced to adjust its sense of scale. Vaibhav launched the very first delivery he faced in the competition for six and then, against Gujarat Titans, scored 101 off 38 balls at the age of 14 years and 32 days, becoming the youngest centurion in men’s T20 cricket. The hundred came in just 35 balls, the second-fastest in IPL history, behind only Gayle’s assault for Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) against Pune Warriors in 2013. RR soon realised that they had not simply bought a teenager, they had bought a teen tornado. TRAINING GROUND FOR A PRODIGYTajpur, in Samastipur district of north Bihar, has open fields and roads and the sort of unhurried horizon from which few expect a cricketer of national consequence to emerge. Yet, this is where Vaibhav began training at the age of four. By 2018, when he was just seven, father Sanjeev had seen enough promise to get his young son enrolled at Manish Ojha’s GenNex Cricket Academy in Patna. The family then began the kind of grind that would exhaust most adults, let alone a child: 175 km from Samastipur to Patna and back on alternate days for practice, often in a vehicle carrying not just the father and son, but even net bowlers brought along to bowl to him.Sanjeev had little interest in conventional “group training”. He wanted something more focused, more demanding, handcrafted around his son’s talent. Ojha, a former Bihar and Jharkhand cricketer, recalls that when Vaibhav first arrived, he was so small that a bouncer would simply have sailed over his head. The first phase of training, therefore, began with underarm throwdowns. The objective was not power but balance, timing and the discipline of watching the ball from the instant it left the hand. Two years later, as Vaibhav gained height and strength, they shifted him to cement pitches, where the hard surface produced steeper bounce and pace.Eventually, the academy introduced sidearm throwers, the slingshot-like training implement used in modern cricket coaching to hurl a cricket ball at speeds of up to 150 kmph with precision. The workload bordered on obsessiveness. Ojha says Vaibhav would often face 600 deliveries in a single day. If the coaches grew tired, the support staff took over. If they tired, the accompanying net bowlers stepped in. Sessions went on till the boy had exhausted every variation thrown at him.Ojha describes Vaibhav as fearless, the sort a coach remembers with pleasure and exhaustion in equal measure. “Vaibhav was never the one to merely block the ball,” he recalls. “This was not because he lacked defensive technique. His mindset was always centred around run-making. Every delivery had scoring potential. With Vaibhav, I realised very early that the challenge was not to curb his aggression, but to shape it intelligently, give it greater control.”Inside the Sooryavanshi household, one cricketer towers above all others in imagination and influence: Brian Lara. Sanjeev introduced Vaibhav to Lara’s batting very early, and the boy is said to have watched countless videos of the left-handed West Indies legend. Sanjeev encouraged that fascination, allowing Lara’s style to quietly shape the foundations of Vaibhav’s batting personality. The influence is clearly visible in his game—the exaggerated backlift, the free strokeplay, the audacity against fast bowling and the instinct to dominate.Ojha worked particularly hard on strengthening the boy’s “punches” through the offside and off the back foot, with emphasis on generating force through the bottom hand. The coach drew inspiration from the methods of Viv Richards and Gordon Greenidge, teaching Vaibhav how to transfer momentum through the left hand at the instant of impact so that the ball exploded through the infield. That technical backbone— at once classical and modern—stands out in Vaibhav’s batting today. The backlift rises high, with the wrists cocked so severely the bat seems to load like a catapult. At the top of the movement, the blade often travels laterally while the front arm remains straight, creating leverage. There is also a slight back-and-across trigger movement before he commits to the stroke. But the true engine of his batting lies in the hands: impossibly quick, and capable of converting a reasonable-length delivery into a boundary before the bowler has quite completed his follow-through. Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar says, “To be able to play in all directions of the ground, you need good wrist work. Vaibhav is not slogging the ball. He is just picking the line and length earlier than the rest of the guys and clearing the rope comfortably.” GENIUS IN MOTION: Vaibhav en route to his 104 against the Aussies in the 2024 youth Test A MOTHER’S IMPACTVaibhav comes from a close-knit family with two brothers. Mother Aarti Singh, a homemaker, embodies the quiet, less visible part of the sacrifice upon which Indian sporting dreams are often built. During the training years, she would prepare 10 lunch boxes before dawn—one for Vaibhav, the others for the net bowlers who travelled with him. This year, when Vaibhav formed the letter ‘A’ with his hands during the blistering 93 against LSG on May 19, it was a tribute to the woman whose sacrifices had shaped his journey long before the stadium lights shone bright on him.That boy is also learning to handle the limelight and expectations around him. “When people talk about me, I try not to pay too much attention to it. I try not to overthink these things,” Vaibhav said after being named Player of the Match on May 19. “In my mind, this is only the beginning. If my career is long, people will naturally say many things. My focus must remain on the game...on completing my journey well.” THE NEXT BIG PITCHAsked about any obvious chinks in Vaibhav’s batting, Indian batting legend Sunil Gavaskar was cautious in his remarks. “At the moment, he is playing white-ball cricket and dominating it,” he said. “Nobody seems to have found any weaknesses in his game so far.”True, having swept the major batting honours in IPL 2026, Vaibhav has rendered the ‘second-season syndrome’ irrelevant. But the goalpost has shifted. The question now is whether he can conquer conditions far removed from the batting havens of the IPL. Can he thrive on the pace and bounce of Australia, the seam-friendly tracks of England? “I don’t foresee any problems for him in limited-overs cricket because pitches across the globe—whether in England, Australia or South Africa—are generally batting-friendly in white-ball matches, so the question of adjustment doesn’t arise,” argues former India batter Mohammad Kaif.Yet the conversation around Vaibhav has never been confined to white-ball cricket. Comparisons with a teenage Sachin Tendulkar—who announced himself with centuries on debut in the Ranji and Irani trophies before making an extraordinary entry into Test cricket—have inevitably fuelled the belief that red-ball success will be the ultimate measure of his greatness.Kaif, though, is unconvinced. “Why is there such a hurry to push him into Test cricket?” he asks. “What he is doing in white-ball cricket is incredible. Why not let him continue in the shorter form of the game for a couple more years? Isn’t that a gift in itself? There’s enough time for him to graduate to red-ball cricket.”And while a first-class average of 17 in eight Ranji Trophy matches may not make for great reading, Vaibhav’s ambitions leave little room for ambiguity. For all the records he has shattered in the shortest format, he continues to speak of Test cricket with reverence, describing it as his “ultimate dream”. The red-ball format, though, can be unforgiving. The swinging conditions, especially overseas, have seen many a talent falter. This is where patience, discipline and technical solidity matter far more than strokeplay. The shift in temperament will be just as important as the shift in format. How quickly Vaibhav adapts will determine whether he remains a thrilling prospect or develops into India’s next batting legend.—with Nikhil Naz- EndsPublished By: Shyam BalasubramanianPublished On: Jun 6, 2026 18:19 IST

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The baby boss | Vaibhav Sooryavanshi

Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the 15-year-old from Bihar, was the story of IPL 2026, rewriting the rules of the T20 format and taking it in a new, heady direction

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