Kolkata: The “great escape” by Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) led to tears in the changing room. After their innings began with a dismissal, KKR’s first win of the season came in a match that went into the last over and saw superb stumpings from both teams.
Taking them there was Varun Chakravarthy hitting a purple patch on a muggy Sunday afternoon, Anukul Roy’s composure and Rinku Singh making the most of an early reprieve to notch up his first half-century since 2023.
It wouldn’t surprise if the game’s second-highest individual score got buried under all this. Especially because it did not come in a winning cause. But what it showed – again – was why the world of cricket cannot have enough of the adult-child named Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. The opener was gone before the Rajasthan Royals (RR) innings reached the halfway mark, falling to a Varun googly but not before showing there is more to his batting than swinging between fine-leg and mid-on.
In terms of runs, or the pace at which they came, the innings at Eden Gardens is unlikely to figure in most top-five compilations of a career that has been compelling, brilliant and belligerent. A 28-ball 46 would struggle to find a place in a list that would have a 35-ball century, a 17-ball 52, a 14-ball 39 which included treating Jasprit Bumrah like just another bowler, or the 78 off 26 balls against Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) where he hit Josh Hazlewood for three fours and a six off successive deliveries and smashed a yorker from Bhuvaneshwar Kumar past the bowler for a boundary.
“Just cannot believe how someone can bat like that,” Dhruv Jurel had said of his teammate with whom he shared a 108-run stand in the six-wicket win against RCB.
Those are Sooryavanshi’s IPL highlights. Add 171, off 95 balls, in the under-19 Asia Cup and the 80-ball 175 in the under-19 World Cup final earlier this year and it can be easy to see why the innings in Kolkata could be edged out. But in the way he adapted to the conditions and refused to bite the bait KKR repeatedly dangled, the effort stood out.
The sample sizes are small because he has only played 13 matches in two IPL seasons but Criviz data shows the slog is the shot that pays most of Sooryavanshi’s bill in this tournament (minimum of 20 runs from any kind of shot being the benchmark). It has fetched 178 runs from 48 balls, only nine of them being dots and eight from which he has taken singles.
With that shot, Sooryavanshi has a boundary percentage of 65, hitting 23 sixes and eight fours and his strike rate is 371 (yes, you read that right). The pull comes next and he has scored 75 off 25 balls with five fours and eight sixes and a strike rate of 300. The flick is the third: four sixes and two fours in 35 runs off 13 deliveries with a strike rate of 269.
And yet on a slow wicket that got slower as afternoon bled into a sultry evening, the 15-year-old hit five of his six boundaries on the off-side. Sooryavanshi’s first four came off a flick after Kartik Tyagi bowled full. Cameron Green was removed from slip when Sooryavanshi comfortably kept down a short delivery. Off the next ball, he guided Tyagi for a four through the slip region. When Vaibhav Arora pitched it short and wide, the opener square-drove for four and then stood tall to ramp him for another boundary. Between those shots, a cut fetched four more. Off the two sixes he hit, one was over bowler Green’s head.
“What makes him special is the ability to execute plans on match days,” Sooryavanshi’s first coach Manish Ojha had told AFP before the IPL. It showed on Sunday.
This wasn’t a track where Sooryavanshi could send the ball in a parabola anywhere between fine-leg and long-on (a Cricinfo wagon wheel showed that 49% of his runs came in that area). By getting the ball away from the left-hander, KKR were tempting him to hit across the line. So, he brought out the cut. And now, going into Wednesday’s match against Lucknow Super Giants, Sooryavanshi has 30 runs from that shot from 17 balls including two fours and a six.
He fell trying to slog against the spin. Credit to KKR for pulling things back after RR’s opening stand of 81 in 8.4 overs but it also showed the value of Sooryavanshi’s innings.
RR’s batting coach Vikram Rathour said the message from the staff to the openers was to assess the slowness of the pitch and adapt. “Today’s innings showed he (Sooryavanshi) can adapt,” said Rathour after the four-wicket defeat, their second on the trot. That is a great sign, he said.