Maturity in the way Sooryavanshi bats, says Aakash Chopra after another impressive performance by the 14-year-old.
Chopra on Suryavanshi: ‘There is some amount of maturity already’.
With only four wins in 14 games and a second-to-last finish, the Rajasthan Royals’ IPL 2025 campaign never really took off. Nevertheless, Vaibhav Suryavanshi, a member of the RR camp, was one of the season’s brightest sparks for all teams.
Suryavanshi finished Tuesday’s match against the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) with 57 off 33 balls. The 14-year-old Suryavanshi scored 252 runs at a remarkable strike rate of 206.55 in the seven games he participated in this season. This featured his third IPL game, where he scored a hundred runs off of just 35 balls.
“Initially when you saw him – and I’ve seen a lot of his clips and the clips that you end up seeing before the guy actually plays the IPL – [the videos] were all of him hitting sixes, just standing and just delivering, fast bowlers, spinners alike,” Aakash Chopra said on ESPNcricinfo’s Time Out show. “And then you start thinking maybe he’s a bit of a slogger, who just sees the ball and hits the ball and he’s got no other gear. He has scored a lot of runs, but again, let’s say it’s [age] group cricket and all of that.
“And then he scored that century, takes centre stage and in that century also, he was just hitting. But now when you see him waiting patiently at the non-striker’s end and that’s exactly what happened today. When Yashasvi Jaiswal was hitting every ball for a four, he was patiently at the other end. He was, okay, 37-run partnership where he contributed only one. And then he waited and then he batted and he’s happy to now rotate strike as well.
“Even in the previous game, when Marco Jansen and Arshdeep Singh were bowling to him, he had a clear-cut plan that ‘if the ball is slightly short, I’m going to play it safely; but if it comes into my range, then it does not matter whether your name is Marco Jansen or Arshdeep Singh, you’re getting deposited into the stands’. So, there is some amount of maturity already for us.”