Young Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has been going through a purple patch, and another show came on Wednesday (May 27), in the IPL Eliminator at New Chandigarh. He smashed a 29-ball 97 as well.
“Just leave him alone, let him go and have fun,” Riyan Parag told broadcasters after the game. Another RR player, Dhruv Jurel also opined on Sooryavanshi’s mindset a bit more in the press conference.
“The best thing about Vaibhav that I have noticed is that he doesn’t plan anything,” Jurel said. “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.'”
“When we go to an academy, (we’re told) ‘Don’t watch the bowler, watch the ball,” Jurel said. “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 want (to) give a damn about any bowler’.”
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Meanwhile, SRH assistant coach James Franklin also admitted that they threw whatever they could at the youngster, but just could not contain him.
“There was a very, very small margin where you could bowl to him. I guess when you’re playing on a really good pitch as well, it makes it particularly hard for bowlers to try and execute that tiny margin that you’re looking for,” Franklin said. “I think you probably saw in the first couple of overs of the Powerplay that we were trying to bowl quite full, sort of inside leg stump, trying to get under his swing. But he started to work that out”.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever seen a talent like this,” Franklin says. “It’s freakish what he’s doing at the moment. To think that he’s potentially got 25 years left in the career is quite scary. He’s only going to get better, he’s only going to get stronger, he’s only going to get more mature with how he bats. Chucking a spinner at Sooryavanshi when he’s going like that in the fourth or fifth over, that’s a tough ask. We did what we could through the Powerplay.”
“When you’re batting, they’re trying to score boundaries as many as they can,” Franklin said. “And I think when they’re bowling as well, they’re trying to bowl a lot of variations to create wicket-taking opportunities. So that’s the way that the game’s going and evolving. And it’s evolved so much in the last five years, the pace of it. Particularly over here in India in the IPL, it’s really a step above in terms of the pace of the game to most other T20 leagues.”
