Follow UsRahul Dravid had risen from his wheelchair, with his hands aloft in the air, as if he were in an 80s Bollywood movie where sheer willpower triumphed over armies of logic. Red blood was flowing in the sinews of the Pink City in patterns that defied principles of Fluid Dynamics. Forget biting nails in nervousness; people were chewing fingers in disbelief.
Even then, all these audacious reactions failed to justify the incredulity everyone witnessed at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur.
14-year-olds are meant to sit in Mathematics classes in 9th grade and prove the congruence of two triangles, not embody perfect symmetry in their shots in the biggest T20 league in the world. They are meant to daydream and make sense of all that’s changing in their bodies at that age, not convert every ridiculous childish dream into reality better than how a Bollywood film imagined it.
Vaibhav Suryavanshi, the Ballistic Babua* from Samastipur, Bihar, played an innings that made one question everything they knew about cricket, or, in fact, sports as a whole—he scored a century in 35 balls, which is the fastest Indian Premier League (IPL) ton by an Indian and the second fastest overall.
Stop and consider it for a second — a century in the IPL before even a hair of beard appeared on his face. Even Sachin Tendulkar was 16 when he made 1989 one of the most famous years in Indian cricket. Spanish football sensation Lamine Yamal made all the records his own at the age of 15, which is still an year later than the age at which Suryavanshi played this innings.
We can go on and on with metaphors to articulate the other-worldliness of this innings. But let just one thing be obvious here — What Suryavanshi did yesterday on April 28 against Gujarat Titans has probably no recorded precedent in cricket history. Maybe one can even take the freedom to extend the immensity of his achievements even beyond cricket.
The main reason behind this is that Suryavanshi did not feel out of place in the Rajasthan Royals setup or on the field at any point. What he lacked in technical finesse and aesthetics on the off side, he more than made up for with his pendulum bat swing, which sent the ball flying 90 metres away from him.
He hit 11 sixes in the 38-ball 101 that he scored.
Moreover, Suryavanshi’s innings didn’t come against a bowling attack of rookies. Against GT, he faced a bowling attack whose every single member is an international bowler. This was also arguably the most efficient bowling attack this season, and GT’s position on the points table is a testament to their performances.
However, Suryavanshi batted against them with a single-minded fearlessness that the senior Indian men’s team has only recently started adopting. It was as if his brain’s Amygdala was incapable of processing fear. As it turned out, his audacity while hitting his first ball (bowled by Shardul Thakur) in the IPL for six was just a teaser.
The exclamation marks started dropping for his Jaipur performance right from when he smashed a short ball from Mohammed Siraj for a maximum, when the senior India pacer thought to show levels to the teenager by bouncing him. Later, Prasidh Krishna also tried to bounce him out, as the 14-year-old kept dancing down the track to give him the Siraj treatment.
The plan was a bit obvious, as the 14-year-old showed immense clarity and ability to judge the length and trajectory of the ball, and smashed a loopy, wide, slower delivery for a six over long off. Krishna bowled that delivery to lure him into mishitting one, but the Ballistic Babua was too good to do that.
Put yourself in the shoes of Siraj, Krishna, Ishant Sharma, and Karim Janat for a moment. You have played at the international level for years now, bowled to the best batters in modern cricket, and here is a 14-year-old tearing the leather off your deliveries with his swashbuckling approach. To say they were shell-shocked would be to say that 15 August 1947 wasn't a small day in Indian history.
What stood out about Suryavanshi’s batting at a granular level was his power generation method. His tall back lift gives him a great base to hit, and then he makes small adjustments depending on the length and line of the ball to create room for his bat’s massive swing. He then adds an extra whip to his shots when he releases his wrists at the moment of impact, which he had locked just at the beginning of his bat swing.
In theory, that’s a near-perfect power-hitting technique. But that’s for an adult, well-formed human body that can generate the required power to hit 90-metre sixes. How a 14-year-old and his wrist bones got that strong can only be found in a biomechanics lab.
Teenagers, forget someone in their early teens like Suryavanshi, aren’t supposed to be this powerful. Human muscles are not supposed to do this so early in their lives. But Suryavanshi was too busy enjoying his shot-making and entertaining us with it even to notice what a genetic freak he already is.
He probably won’t even understand the enormity of the fact that yesterday, he had the highest boundary% in any IPL century. You can probably gauge it by the fact that he just kept smiling when asked about his innings post-match, and mentioned that the hard work he has put in practice is finally showing.
As for fear, only 10th graders who know sin/cos = tan have understood it. Suryavanshi has already scored a ‘ton’ and isn’t even there yet.
The closest precedent one can find of this in cricket is Tendulkar on that 1989 Pakistan tour. But even Tendulkar didn’t show the kind of power Suryavanshi displayed yesterday. In fact, if you compare him with a late-teenage Rishabh Pant who debuted in the IPL and impressed everyone with his big shots, you’ll find that Suryavanshi is already striking the ball cleaner and further.
It was almost as if someone had made Suryavanshi in a biomechanics lab to bat in T20 cricket. While his off-side game is still developing (as evident from the wagon wheel above), he has shown range even there after getting set.
If you think about it, Suryavanshi grew up watching the IPL and seeing the likes of Gayle and David Warner bat. He had already seen and understood what he needed to do if he ever made it to the league from there. However, no one, not even his father, who honed his craft through his blood, sweat and money, could have imagined that his son would hit a century in his third IPL game at just 14 years of age.
But here we are, watching the future unfold before us with an audacity unseen in the past. After all, isn’t this what T20 cricket batting is all about? To abandon set methods, challenge the status quo by your chutzpah, and then blast off into orbit like a rocket?
Suryavanshi, by hitting a century at just 14, didn’t just prove himself a genetic anomaly. He also showed how inclusive T20 cricket can be by allowing freaks of nature like him to come and be bodacious from ball one.
You don’t need to have a Rahul Dravid-level technique to succeed in the shortest format. You need just some good base, and a lot of daring and gumption. The teenager’s century was a reminder of that basic tenet yesterday. What happens to the Ballistic Babua from here on will probably gain more attention than his century against GT.
Sometimes, the ones who dared to fly close to the sun become the biggest legends. However, Vaibhav Suryavanshi didn’t just do an Icarus yesterday. He gobbled up the sun like it’s a mango and shone brighter than any other teenager has ever done in the centuries-old history of this game.
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Note: Babua is an endearment term for young boys in Bihar and Eastern UP.