Pat Cummins has seen plenty in top-level cricket, but even he sounded a little startled after what unfolded in Jaipur. After Sunrisers Hyderabad chased down 229 to beat Rajasthan Royals by five wickets, the SRH captain reserved some of his warmest words not for a team-mate, but for the 15-year-old who had nearly taken the game away from them. “I think he’s my new favourite player,” Cummins said of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi after the match. “He hits the ball so hard, it’s great to watch.”
The quote landed because it followed one of the most outrageous knocks of the IPL season. Sooryavanshi blasted 103 for Rajasthan Royals, while Dhruv Jurel added 51 and Donovan Ferreira 33, lifting RR to 228 for 6. It still wasn’t enough. Sunrisers Hyderabad got home on 229 for 5 with nine balls left, powered by Ishan Kishan’s 74 and Abhishek Sharma’s 57 in a chase that underlined just how savage modern T20 batting has become.
That is what made Cummins’ praise feel genuine rather than polite. This was not admiration from a distance or a throwaway line after a comfortable game. It came from the opposing captain, on the winning side, after Sooryavanshi had torn into his attack and briefly made a huge total look match-winning. Even in defeat, the teenager ended up as the emotional center of the night.
Sooryavanshi’s innings also kept building the strange sense that he is no longer just a novelty story. He is already a real IPL force. ESPNcricinfo’s recent coverage has framed him as one of the breakout figures of the season, and his profile on the official IPL site lists his date of birth as March 27, 2011, which is why every performance still carries that extra jolt of disbelief: he is doing this at 15.
There was a cruel edge to it for Rajasthan. They got a hundred from a teenager, crossed 225, and still lost. In most seasons that kind of innings becomes the story of a straightforward win. Here, it became something a little stranger: a match-losing hundred that somehow felt even bigger because the opposition kept coming and still had the generosity, or maybe the honesty, to stop and applaud it afterward.
Cummins’ line about a “new favourite player” will travel fast because it captures the mood around Sooryavanshi better than a laboured analysis ever could. Cricket has a habit of making prodigies seem overhyped until one night, suddenly, they don’t look overhyped at all. They just look inevitable. On this evidence, Sooryavanshi is getting very close to that territory.
