King of the Kids

GH on the new prodigy

He’s not old enough to vote yet, pal

The temptation is to reprise Lincoln Steffens: I have seen the future and its name is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Because Sooryavanshi is all about the future. Sam Konstas was nineteen when he took his sixes from Jasprit Bumrah; Sooryavanshi has given Bumrah a touch up having just turned fifteen, the age Malala and Greta first rose to prominence. He is younger even than current phenoms like Max Dowman, the youngest Premier League goal scorer, and Owen Cooper, the youngest Emmy winner.

The occasion was an eleven-over thrash between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians here in Guwahati, much anticipated even by Et Al. Bumrah started with a length ball; Sooryavanshi wellied it into the crowd beyond mid-wicket. Sooryavanshi had hit his first ball in the IPL for six last year, of course. But now he awaited the inevitable change up from Bumrah, and treated it with similar disdain. By hitting three more sixes, in fact, the prodigy took possession of one of those IPL records it never occurs to you they keep - the most sixes before the age of twenty, with another five years to build a peak that surely nobody will else will scale. The fourteenth ball Sooryavanshi faced would surely have gone for six as well, although it hardly tracked above head height: Tilak Varma needed palms of steel to arrest it with his back against the cover boundary. Out for 39, leaving Rajasthan Royals one for 80 after five overs. Yashasvi Jaiswal was going like a train at the other end, but he’s twenty-four and has pencilled a moustache on, so who cares, right? The Royals coach who spotted Sooryavanshi eighteen months ago thought he was better than India’s dashing opener then: ‘I told them, he's Jaiswal multiplied by two already.’